Seraj Zeba Islam

Seraj has been teaching molecular biology and working on ways for producing salt tolerant rice for Bangladesh using molecular biological and biotechnological approaches. She helped fine-map salt tolerant loci from Pokkali for introgression in a marker-assisted backcrossing approach into commercial rice. She has characterized many Bangladeshi rice landraces as salt tolerant and elucidated the mechanism of Horkuch, whose loci have been introgressed into commercial rice using fluorescent markers. She is working on the only halophyte which can set rice-like grains and which is endemic to the whole coastline of Bangladesh. Several genes from this Oryza coarctata have been cloned into salt sensitive rice. She is doing genome editing of commercial rice to increase photosynthetic efficiency and increase salt tolerance. She has established tissue culture independent transformation in rice. She is the founder director of a center under Dhaka University for conduction of online bioinformatics classes from January 2017. She has supervised 11 PhD students and over 70 Masters students. She has organized many conferences and workshops in Molecular Biology. She has been appointed as UGC Professor.