The Biological & Environmental Science & Engineering Division is very pleased to announce the appointment of Prof. Simon Krattinger.
He joined the Plant Science program as an Assistant Professor on the 1st of August with strong interests in genetics and genomics of cereal plants, plant-pathogen interactions, disease resistance mechanisms, molecular breeding, gene cloning and gene diversification.

Professor Krattinger’s group is focused on the genetic and molecular basis of stress adaptation in cereals, with a particular interest in the perception, signaling and response to fungal pathogens in wheat. His group recently developed a novel gene cloning approach that makes gene cloning in wheat more rapid and cost-effective. This approach will enable the rapid isolation of agriculturally important genes in wheat and barley in the future. A second major focus of his research is to understand the molecular basis of quantitative disease resistance. The cloning of a considerable number of the reported disease resistance genes will allow him to study the molecular basis of this interaction. The third research direction of his group concerns the advancement of wheat genomics. His research group is part of the ’10 Wheat Genomes Project’ where he will generate a high-quality genome sequence of a Swiss winter wheat cultivar. The completion of these ten high-quality genomes will allow to study the diversity among different wheat cultivars and to establish the so-called ‘pan-genome’.