Dr. Sharifah Farhana

I am interested in developing biological control agents and strategies; and further extending current understanding of the mechanisms involved during plant-microbe and plant defence interactions. For my PhD, I worked to discover natural biological suppression of soil-borne diseases and growth promotion using biological control agents; how plants defend themselves against pathogens at the cellular and whole plant level. I studied biocontrol capabilities of soil bacterial isolates in plants to identifying plant molecular marker genes involved in disease suppression to Phytophthora capsica, by performing plant disease-suppressing assay. Apart from that, I also studied the mechanism of actions of plant-growth promotion bacteria using various biochemical assays and chromatography analysis and how they might be used commercially for various purposes.