New and Future Developments in Microbial Biotechnology and Bioengineering

1. The Use of Microorganisms for Gene Transfer and Crop Improvement 2. Actinomycetes as potential plant growth promoting microbial communities 3. Microbial genes in crop improvement 4. Microbial transformations implicit with soil and crop productivity in rice system 5. Application of Microbial Biotechnology in Food Processing 6. Innate immunity engaged or disengaged in plant-microbe interactions 7. Novel Strategies for Engineering Resistance to Plant Viral Diseases 8. Molecular characterization of sugarcane viruses and their diagnostics 9. Cyanobacterial Biodiversity and Biotechnology: A Promising Approach for Crop Improvement 10. Pseudomonas flourescens - A Potential Plant Growth Promoting Rhizobacteria (PGPR) and biocontrol agent 11. Crop Improvement Through Microbial Technology: a Step Towards Sustainable Agriculture 12. Microbial technologies for sustainable crop production 13. Trichoderma, its multifarious utility in crop improvement 14. Microbe-mediated enhancement of nitrogen and phosphorus content for crop improvement 15. Microbiome in Crops: Diversity, distribution and potential role in crops improvements 16. Plant Growth Promoting Rhizobacteria (PGPR): Perspective in Agriculture under Biotic and Abiotic stress 17. Rhizosphere metabolite profiling: An opportunity to understand plant-microbe interactions for crop improvement 18. Phosphate-solubilizing Pseudomonads for improving crop plant nutrition and agricultural productivity 19. Targeted Genome editing for crop improvement in post genome sequencing era 20. Endophytic Microorganisms: Their Role in Plant Growth and Crop Improvement 21. Microbes in crop improvement: future challenges and perspective 22. Plant-microbe interaction and genome sequencing: an evolutionary insight 23. Crop breeding using CRISPR/Cas9

Ram Prasad, Ph.D. is associated with Department of Botany, Mahatma Gandhi Central University, Motihari, Bihar, India. His research interest includes applied microbiology, plant-microbe-interactions, sustainable agriculture and nanobiotechnology. Dr. Prasad has more than one hundred fifty publications to his credit, including research papers, review articles & book chapters and five patents issued or pending, and edited or authored several books. Dr. Prasad has twelve years of teaching experience and has been awarded the Young Scientist Award & Prof. J.S. Datta Munshi Gold Medal by the International Society for Ecological Communications; FSAB fellowship by the Society for Applied Biotechnology; the American Cancer Society UICC International Fellowship for Beginning Investigators, USA; Outstanding Scientist Award in the field of Microbiology by Venus International Foundation; BRICPL Science Investigator Award and Research Excellence Award etc. He has been serving as editorial board members: Frontiers in Microbiology, Frontiers in Nutrition, Phyton- International Journal of Experimental Botany; Academia Journal of Biotechnology including Series editor of Nanotechnology in the Life Sciences, Springer Nature, USA. Previously, Dr. Prasad served as Assistant Professor Amity University Uttar Pradesh, India; Visiting Assistant Professor, Whiting School of Engineering, Department of Mechanical Engineering at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, United States and Research Associate Professor at School of Environmental Science and Engineering, Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou, China. Currently assistant professor at MD University, Rohtak, India, Sarvajeet Singh Gill has made significant contributions to abiotic stress tolerance. Sarvajeet Gill's main area of research includes genetic engineering, stress physiology and molecular biology. Together with Narendra Tuteja he is working on plant helicases and discovered a novel function of plant MCM6 and PHH45 in tobacco and rice for salinity stress tolerance that will help to improve crop production at sub-optimal conditions. Furthermore, he also reported that Cd at high dose perturbs growth, photosynthesis and nitrogen metabolism while at low dose it up regulates sulfur assimilation and antioxidant machinery in garden cress. Sarvajeet Gill has edited several books and has a number of research papers, review articles, and book chapters to his name. An elected fellow of numerous national and international academies, Dr. Narendra Tuteja is currently Professor and head at Amity Institute of Microbial Technology, NOIDA, India, and visiting Scientist at International Centre for Genetic Engineering & Biotechnology (ICGEB), New Delhi, India. He has made significant contributions to crop improvement under adverse conditions, reporting the first helicase from plant and human cells and demonstrating new roles of Ku autoantigen, nucleolin and eIF4A as DNA helicases. Furthermore, he discovered novel functions of helicases, G-proteins, CBL-CIPK and LecRLK in plant stress tolerance, and PLC and MAP-kinase as effectors for G and G G-proteins. Narendra Tuteja also reported several high salinity stress tolerant genes from plants and fungi and developed salt/drought tolerant plants.