University of the Punjab.

Seed Biotechnology Lab
Dr. Usman Arif is working as an Assistant Professor in Seed Biotechnology lab at CEMB. He has ample experience in working with plant metabolic engineering of plant natural products and/or specialized metabolites which play a pivotal role in plant defense and adaptive response under continue varying environmental conditions. There is limited information available about biosynthetic pathways of majority of the secondary metabolites and his research is focused on to elucidate such pathways by identifying key genes catalyzing rate-limiting steps involved in their biosynthesis. Few of the metabolites under investigation are gossypol and steroidal glycoalkaloids produced in cotton and potato respectively. These metabolites stress-induced and render toxic for humans once their levels surpass upper safety limit. The major goal of his research is to control the metabolite levels in such a way that these are not poisonous for human consumption. To achieve it, combination of transcriptomics, metabolomics, analytical chemistry and molecular biology is being employed and setting up a platform where genetic circuits can be rewired or modulate to increase the directional carbon flux for the synthesis of targeted compound or metabolite.
Dr. Usman Arif earned his PhD from Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, Uppsala, Sweden and then continued his postdoc research at The Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm. He also worked as researcher at the School of Plant Science, Unversity of Arizona, USA before joining CEMB as faculty member. Dr. Usman has also worked in industry where he was part of team who developed various protocols specific to metabolite analysis by using GC-MS and HPLC. Apart from Science, He is interested in sports, travel, reading and music.