Zhongchi Liu

Professor; Lead Genetics Team

Zhongchi Liu

Dr. Liu is currently a Professor at the Dept. of Cell Biology and Molecular Genetics, University of Maryland, College Park, MD. Dr. Liu received her Ph.D. in Cell and Developmental Biology, Harvard University and postdoc training in Plant Development under Dr. Elliot Meyerowitz at California Institute of Technology. In the past ten years, Dr. Liu has been focusing on developing molecular genetic tools for the wild strawberry Fragaria vesca, including several genomic resources such as the Strawberry Genome Resources (SGR) (http://bioinformatics.towson.edu/strawberry/), an eFP browser for visualization of RNA-seq data across flower and fruit tissues (http://mb3.towson.edu/efp/cgi-bin/efpWeb.cgi), and consensus co-expression network (http://159.203.72.198:3838/fvesca/). Her lab published the first successful CRISPR/Cas9 genome editing of Fragaria vesca and developed a set of CRISPR vectors for dissemination (Zhou et al., Plant Biotechnology Journal, 2018). Her lab successfully identified and isolated a key strawberry gene that controls runner formation (Caruana et al., Molecular Plant, 2018). Dr. Liu and her group showed that the strawberry gene (RGA1) in the GA signaling pathway represses runner formation. Using an inducible system to switch on and off this gene, they were able to turn off or turn on runner formation.

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