Genetic Engineering and Genome Editing Workshop was held for three days at Agricultural Biotechnology Research Institute of Iran by Goetz Hensel, Ph.D., from the Institute of Plant Genetics and Crop Plant Research, Molecular Plant Nutrition Group, from 8 to 10 April, 2017.

     The workshop included practical and theoretical courses in barley genetic engineering, gene transfer to immature barley embryos, utilizing gene gun and gene silencing by the use of gene editing techniques and functional analysis with florescent microscope. 

     Goetz Hensel graduated from the Technical University of Magdeburg, Magdeburg, Germany, in 1994. In 1996, he joined the Yeast Genetics group at the IPK Gatersleben as a Ph.D. student to work on the molecular characterization of a tobacco protein involved in plant-pathogen interactions and earned his Ph.D. degree from the University of Braunschweig, Braunschweig, Germany. Later, Hensel joined the same institute at the Plant Reproductive Biology group as a Postdoc and was crucially involved in the establishment and improvement of methods of agrobacterium-mediated gene transfer to barley, wheat, and triticale. Beside the generation of more than 10,000 transgenic barley plants, he was essentially involved in the development of a GATEWAY-compatible binary vector set for monocot transformation as well as in a new principle of RNA-mediated downregulation of genes called host-induced gene silencing (HIGS). In recent years, Hensel has focused on the molecular mechanisms underlying the initiation of barley pollen embryogenesis and the telomere-mediated truncation of barley chromosomes.

Photographed by: Sina Motamed