New and Future Developments in Microbial Biotechnology and Bioengineering

Dr. Ram Prasad is an Associate Professor at Mahatma Gandhi Central University, Bihar, India. Dr. Prasad has served as an Assistant Professor Amity University Uttar Pradesh, India; Visiting Assistant Professor, Whiting School of Engineering, Department of Mechanical Engineering at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, United States, and Research Associate Professor at School of Environmental Science and Engineering, Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou, China. Dr. Prasad has more than two hundred publications to his credit, including research papers, review articles, and book chapters; has edited or authored several books; and has five patents issued or pending. He’s on the editorial boards of a number of journals, and his research interests include plant-microbe interaction, agriculture sustainability, nanobiotechnology, and applied microbiology.Sarvajeet Singh Gill is an Associate Professor at the Centre for Biotechnology, Maharshi Dayanand University, Rohtak, India. His research areas include agricultural plant biotechnology, biotic and abiotic stress biology, plant microbe interaction, and in-silico understanding of plant genomes. He has 12 years of research and 10 years of teaching experience. Dr. Gill has written over 50 book chapters and published over 100 peer reviewed publications in reputed SCI journals and edited around 30 books published by International publishers such Springer-Verlag, Wiley-Blackwell, CRC Press, and Elsevier, among others. He has carried out four R&D projects funded by prominent National funding agencies as Principal Investigator. An elected fellow of numerous national and international academies, Dr. Narendra Tuteja is currently Professor and head at Amity Institute of Microbial Technology, NOIDA, India, and visiting Scientist at International Centre for Genetic Engineering & Biotechnology (ICGEB), New Delhi, India. He has made significant contributions to crop improvement under adverse conditions, reporting the first helicase from plant and human cells and demonstrating new roles of Ku autoantigen, nucleolin and eIF4A as DNA helicases. Furthermore, he discovered novel functions of helicases, G-proteins, CBL-CIPK and LecRLK in plant stress tolerance, and PLC and MAP-kinase as effectors for Gα and Gβ G-proteins. Narendra Tuteja also reported several high salinity stress tolerant genes from plants and fungi and developed salt/drought tolerant plants.

• 1. The Use of Microorganisms for Gene Transfer and Crop Improvement2. Actinomycetes as potential plant growth promoting microbial communities 3. Microbial genes in crop improvement4. Microbial transformations implicit with soil and crop productivity in rice system 5. Application of Microbial Biotechnology in Food Processing 6. Innate immunity engaged or disengaged in plant-microbe interactions7. Novel Strategies for Engineering Resistance to Plant Viral Diseases8. Molecular characterization of sugarcane viruses and their diagnostics9. Cyanobacterial Biodiversity and Biotechnology: A Promising Approach for Crop Improvement10. Pseudomonas flourescens - A Potential Plant Growth Promoting Rhizobacteria (PGPR) and biocontrol agent11. Crop Improvement Through Microbial Technology: a Step Towards Sustainable Agriculture12. Microbial technologies for sustainable crop production13. Trichoderma, its multifarious utility in crop improvement14. Microbe-mediated enhancement of nitrogen and phosphorus content for crop improvement15. Microbiome in Crops: Diversity, distribution and potential role in crops improvements 16. Plant Growth Promoting Rhizobacteria (PGPR): Perspective in Agriculture under Biotic and Abiotic stress17. Rhizosphere metabolite profiling: An opportunity to understand plant–microbe interactions for crop improvement18. Phosphate-solubilizing Pseudomonads for improving crop plant nutrition and agricultural productivity19. Targeted Genome editing for crop improvement in post genome sequencing era20. Endophytic Microorganisms: Their Role in Plant Growth and Crop Improvement 21. Microbes in crop improvement: future challenges and perspective22. Plant-microbe interaction and genome sequencing: an evolutionary insight23. Crop breeding using CRISPR/Cas9