Dr. Aniça Amini
European Research Manager
Sylvan Inc. France
Dr Aniça Amini currently serves as Sylvan’s European Research Manager. She leads a team that is focused on the breeding of innovative new mushroom varieties, as well as research designed to explore the interaction of mushroom mycelium with growing substrates, spawn formulations and other mushroom cultivation technologies.
Dr Amini received a PhD in plant biotechnology from University of Tours (France), and conducted post-doctoral research at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey (USA), where her work focused on epigenetic regulation in plants.
Since joining Sylvan over a decade ago, Dr. Amini and her team have successfully brought a number of innovative new mushroom varieties to the global market including Tuscan 820 a brown Agaricus strain, SPX281 a sporeless oyster mushroom variety and more recently SLX328 a novel new shiitake hybrid.
As an integral part of Sylvan’s global research and development her team and her colleagues are recognized as leaders in the mushroom sciences and have been able to develop a modern crop breeding system using genetic markers, new generation sequencing systems and tools to manipulate the mushroom genome including the use CRISPR and RNAi technologies. As a result, Dr. Amini and her colleagues hold a significant number of patents related to their work.
Sylvan Breeding research program
With the advent of molecular and genomic tools, mushroom breeding methods have evolved from traditional breeding selection to molecular based breeding strategies. The use of these modern tools allow breeders to gain big advantages in both time and efficiency.
In this presentation we will explain how Sylvan’s Global breeding program incorporates a molecular breeding approach, and by using “Omics” technologies such as new generation sequencing, we are able to identify markers for key traits and more efficiently characterize our breeding germplasm.
We will also discuss how genome editing technology such as RNAi and CRISPR has been included in our research program