Prof. Dr. Muhammad Sarwar Khan assumes the charge of the office of the Vice Chancellor

FAISALABAD October 21, 2024: Prof. Dr. Muhammad Sarwar Khan has assumed the charge of the office of the Vice Chancellor, University of Agriculture Faisalabad after the retirement of Prof Dr Iqrar Ahmad Khan. He is the alumnus of Cambridge University and an internationally well-known Molecular Biotechnologist. He has introduced two high-yielding and potential varieties of Genetically Modified sugarcane including Insect-resistant transgenic sugarcane (CABB-IRS) and Herbicide-tolerant transgenic sugarcane (CABB-HTS). He pioneered plant chloroplast genetic engineering approach in UK, Finland and Pakistan. He is pioneer in expressing green fluorescent protein (GFP) in plant chloroplasts and his research findings were published in Nature Biotechnology and The Plant Journal. He is pioneer in developing plastid transformation in monocots; including rice and sugarcane. He developed efficient and reproducible regeneration protocols for rice, sugarcane and carrot. He also has developed methods for regenerating plants from in vitro grown rice and sugarcane to help cells to sort out and improve homoplasmy levels of transgenic chloroplasts. His research interests are: functional analyses of chloroplast genes by reverse genetics and expression of foreign genes in the chloroplasts to confer agronomic traits such as insect-pest resistance, salinity and herbicide tolerance. He said that quality education and research were the prerequisite for the development and knowledge based economy for which the university was turning all stone to ensure the quality manpower and tangible research work based on the solution of the farming community, industry and the society. He said that university was putting a focus on academia, research, agricultural and rural development internationalization, academy industry linkages that will be further strengthened. Further, his group is actively involved in overexpression of antigenic and therapeutic proteins in chloroplasts to develop cost-effective therapeutics and vaccines since chloroplasts are distinguished photosynthetic organelles within plant cells having their own genome. Plastid gene expression resembles with their prokaryotic progenitor. Transgenic plastids offer unique advantages to plant biotechnology, including high-level foreign gene expression, absence of epigenetic effects and gene containment due to lack of transgene transmission through pollens. --