GENius of the Month – November
The ‘GENius of November 2018’ is Dr Sadiye Hayta.
Sadiye leads research on the transformation and genome editing of wheat at the John Innes Centre within the Professor Wendy Harwood’s group. Her focus is on developing and delivering gene editing applications within wheat for both John Innes Centre research and for external collaborators.
Sadiye was nominated for her great performance throughout 2018, with her nomination stating:
“Sadiye has had a great year, her recent paper ‘Agrobacterium-mediated transformation systems of Primula vulgaris’ represents the first ever transformation protocol for Primula transformation.
Not only that but it is a paper which detailed not one but two separate methods:
- Rapid transient gene expression to analyse transgene functions
- Producing stable transgenics of Primula vulgaris
These methods will be key to characterising the genes responsible for the control of floral heteromorphy, in Phil Gilmartin’s group and for other Primula gene study programmes.
In addition Sadiye has contributed to two further publications this year – one from Graham Moore’s group ‘Magnesium Increases Homoeologous Crossover Frequency During Meiosis in ZIP4 (Ph1 Gene) Mutant Wheat-Wild Relative Hybrids’ for which Sadiye played a key part in producing the ZIP4 CRISPR wheat lines.
Sadiye also oversees the wheat transformation and wheat CRISPR genome editing work in the crop transformation group and is currently working with 5 different groups at the John Innes Centre to produce wheat transgenics and edited lines. The plant lines that she is producing are likely to be very important in moving research forward in many areas.
She has also been very active in training in wheat transformation with two recent visitors getting excellent results after Sadiye’s careful tuition.
Sadiye also got involved in the speed breeding work of Brande Wullf’s group ‘Speed breeding: a powerful tool to accelerate crop research and breeding’.
Finally, Sadiye and has contributed to several conference posters from the Crop Transformation Group this year. She took one conference poster that she prepared to the Frontiers in Genome Engineering conference in Beijing, China, where she represented the group.”
Well-deserved, congratulations Sadiye.