Dr. To Thi Mai Huong
Leader of Plant biotechnology team at Department of Life Sciences
University of Science and Technology of Hanoi (Vietnam)
Email: to-thi-mai.huong@usth.edu.vn
I owned my Engineer degree from the Hanoi University of Science and Technology (AUF excellent program) since 2006. Then I received my Master (AgroSup Dijon, France), my PhD (University of Burgundy, France) and my MBA (Dijon Institute of Business Administration, France) in 2007, 2010 and 2011 respectively. Prior to joining Vietnam – France University, I gained my Post-Doctoral experience on Plant metabolic engineering at the French National Center for Scientic Research (CNRS) from 2011 to 2012.
Since January 2013, I am a lecturer- researcher at department of Life Science at Vietnam – France University where I leads my teaching and research into Plant biotechnology, more specifically focused on Rice Functional genomics and mecanisme of stress tolerance in rice.
From 2013 to the end of 2015, I was one of the key person in the bilateral project funded by MARD[1] entitled “Characterization of new genes and alleles involved in root development and drought tolerance in rice”. This project aimed at the : (i) validation of regulatory molecular pathways involved in rice root development based on functional genomics approach as well as to (ii) characterize the Vietnamese rice panel for drought stress tolerance using association mapping on the core rice Vietnamese collection.
From 2016, I am a Principal Investigator of a NAFOSTED project work on the rice defense system via Jasmonic Acid pathway and works on several project about Rice endophytic bacteria and Phosphate starvation tolerance in rice.
Course's Detail
The future of food security resides with crop diversity, and sustaining rice production bases mainly on the intelligent use of rice diversity. Asia has long been known as the cradle of rice agriculture. Since rice is cultivated in various agro-ecosystems, they possess many precious traits like resistance to biotic stress (such as blast, blight, brown planthopper…) or abiotic stress (e.g.: resistant to salinity, drought, submergence…), which are very useful for breeding. Therefore, the natural variation needs to be well characterized at the phenotypic as well as at the molecular and genetic level in order to be able to select beneficial alleles for breeding efficiently.
Recently, a new approach based on the high-throughput genotyping using NGS technology has fast become a popular alternative to QTL mapping. GWAS relied on the correlation between genetic single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNP) and the phenotypic differences of interested traits of individuals. GWAS is a new efficient and powerful toolkit for tapping the genetic potential in crops. GWAS can be conducted directly on panels of varieties without having to develop a specific mapping population. Moreover, GWAS enables the exploration of the large diversity of alleles present in the valuable traditional genetic resources.
In this seminar, first, the principle and various applications of GWAS in agriculture will be introduced to the audience. Next, we will introduce some advances technology in high-throughput morphological phenotyping. Finally, some integrative approaches of GWAS and the high-throughput profiling techniques for molecular traits (e.g., metabolome and transcriptome) will also be mention. This approach could lead to bridge the gap between the agronomic traits regulated by complex mechanisms and their responsive genes.