Gökhan Karakülah, Dokuz Eylül University, Turkey
Gökhan Karakülah, PhD, is a computational biologist specializing in next generation sequencing and multiomics analysis. Dr. Karakülah’s research has focused on noncoding genes and repeat elements, especially transposable elements, and their roles in biological processes, such as development and disease.
Marie-Anne Van Sluys, Universidade de São Paulo; Botânica - Biosciences Institute, Brazil
Marie-Anne Van Sluys is a full professor with three main areas of research namely transposable elements, genomics and plant-microbe interactions. These are key to her strong capacity building in molecular biology and genomics of plants and bacteria in Brazil. In the early 90s, she demonstrated that Ac transposable element from maize could jump to new chromosomal locations in Arabidopsis thaliana genome as well as methylation at specific genic positions resulted in silencing the element even in heterologous systems after meiosis. More recently, studies on the genome of several plant pathogens unraveled the association of these moving units with genomic islands that define species and pathotypes mostly in Xylella and Xanthomonas, important pathogens of several worldwide important crops such as rice, orange, sugarcane, cauliflower and tomato.
