Recognizing Plant Direct first authors: Soumen Nandy

Soumen Nandy, co-first author of Heat-shock inducible CRISPR/Cas9 system generates heritable mutations in rice

Current Position: Program Associate

Education: PhD, Department Of Botany, University Of Delhi, India

Non-scientific Interests: Reading, Music, Gardening and avid listener of NPR radio

Brief bio: For my PhD program, I developed a platform to assess the genetic fidelity of tissue culture raised plants, using molecular markers, in coffee, tea, turmeric and teak. Under the mentorship of Prof Vibha Srivastava at University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, US, I developed a platform for marker free site-specific gene integration in rice and gene stacking, using site-specific recombination systems – Cre/lox and FLP/FRT. In this project, I worked on developing inducible CRISPR/Cas9 system for curbing off-target effects.