You are hereby invited for the above Seminar Talk by Prof. Kan Wang on Tuesday, November 4, 2014, starting 1130hrs through to 1230hrs. The venue will be the Ndama Lounge.

Prof. Kan Wang is the Director of plant transformation facility in Iowa State University. She developed plant transformation facilities for public. This facility was the first one in Iowa and has been used since for maize, soybean and rice. In her presentation, she will discuss the development of innovative and transformative TALEN (Transcription Activator-Like Effector Nuclease) technology, which can make critical plant traits accessible to modern genetic tools and accelerate the production of improved crops. Delivery of proteins instead of protein-encoding DNA fragments into plant cells is of particular interest for genome editing because it can avoid DNA (transgene) integration into the genome and generate precisely modified “non-transgenic” plants. Recently her group have demonstrated that a bacterial blight disease resistant rice line that is free of any transgene can be produced using the TALEN-based engineering. This technology can generate bioengineered crops containing no transgenes and thus do not fall under the guidelines regulating genetically modified organisms. This technology was discovered and developed by researchers at Iowa State University (ISU)

Tea will be served at 1115hrs.

Your confirmation and participation to the meeting will be appreciated to finalize planning logistics.

Susan