Mohamed El Soda

Project: Bulked Segregant Microarray (BSM)-QTL analysis of drought stress response in Arabidopsis thaliana and Brassica rapa.

Drought is greatly affecting plant growth and crop production. Plant morphological responses to water limiting conditions (changing the morphology of roots or shoots and flowering time) are controlled by many genes and known as quantitative traits. Our aim is to identify new genes underlying root and shoot response to drought.

The first step is performing Quantitative Trait Locus (QTL) analysis for interesting traits. We expect to identify several new QTLs, as well as interactions between QTLs, and interactions between QTLs and stress conditions.

The second step is to study the difference in gene expression between drought tolerant and non-tolerant accessions using two bulked samples composed of plants that segregated according to the two different parental alleles. We expect to reveal some genes that are relevant for the natural adaptation to drought stress in Arabidopsis and Brassica, which will serve as an example for the drought stress response network in crop species.

Education and Training

Since November 2008 PhD-fellow in the Laboratory of Genetics, WUR, Netherlands

2006 – 2008 M.Sc in Plant Breeding, Genetics and Bioinformatics, Leibniz University Hannover, Germany

2005 - 2006 Training course “Plant Oriented Biotechnology”, Germany

2003- currently assistant lecturer Dept. of Genetics, Faculty of Agriculture, Cairo University, Egypt

1998 - 2002 B.Sc in Agricultural Biotechnology, Cairo University, Egypt

Publications

Mohamed El Soda, Satya Swathi Nadakuduti, Klaus Pillen and Ralf Uptmoor (2010). Stability parameter and genotype mean estimates for drought stress effects on root and shoot growth of wild barley pre-introgression lines. Mol Breeding 26:583–593

Gloria Afolayan, Mohamed El Soda, Nguyen Phuong, Hartmut Stützel, Willy Wenzel, Ralf Uptmoor. Genetic dissection of pre-flowering growth and development of Sorghum bicolor under well watered and drought stress conditions (submitted)

Promotor: Prof. Dr. Maarten Koornneef

Supervisor: Dr. Mark Aarts