Dr. Naoufal Lakhssassi is currently Post-doctoral researcher in the department of Plant Soil and Agricultural Systems, Agriculture College, Southern Illinois University, USA. He holds PhD in the field of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology from Malaga University, Spain in the year 2011. He has been working on different biology projects related with microbiology, plant genetics, biochemistry, biotechnology, plant developmental biology, plant evolution, and bioinformatics. He served as an Ad-hoc reviewer for several scientific journals including BMC genomics, Plos1, Plant Cell reports, Crop science, and Atlas Journal of Biology. He is serving in the editorial board of the peer review Soil Science and Plant Health journal, with over 60 online Journal titles, in the disciplines of Clinical, Medical, Pharmaceutical, Life sciences, Environmental, Engineering, and Management, in addition to the Plant Science journal. He handled several research projects during these years mainly working with Arabidopsis thaliana, tomato and soybean with a major focus on soybean disease resistance and seed composition using mutation screening. Dr. Naoufal Lakhssassi research work include characterization of considerable mutants/lines with increased seed oleic and stearic acids content, high protein content, high yielding varieties, lines with high percentage of nodulation, high nitrogen content, in addition to the characterization of several genes involved in seed germination, plant development, fatty acid content, and soybean resistance against SCN, an important aspect in plant production. Most of the results obtained from his research have been verbally presented in international conferences (PAG, AMAS, WSRC, etc.), published in peer review scientific journals, while more articles are in submission process or in elaboration, in addition to a book chapter, Co-PI in two grants attributed from United Soybean board, and two patent applications.

Microbiology, Plant genetics, Biochemistry, Biotechnology, Plant developmental biology, Plant evolution and Bioinformatics.