Hafiz Muhammad Khalid Abbas

University of Tennessee

Hafiz Muhammad Khalid Abbas is a postdoctoral research associate working in the field of plant molecular biology at the University of Tennessee, USA. He earned his Ph.D. from Huazhong Agricultural University, Wuhan, China, and then joined the Guangdong Academy of Agricultural Sciences as a postdoctoral Fellow. He has undertaken an extensive study of plant defense responses and plant nutrient quality and uses functional genomics and metabolomics to understand plant-pathogen interactions. He has won one research grant and has published 19 research articles in leading journals including the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, Theoretical and Applied Genetics, BMC Genomics, and Science China Life Sciences. His editorial and review activities for multiple impact factor journals have made him a distinctive and progressive figure among his peers.

1books edited

Latest work with IntechOpen by Hafiz Muhammad Khalid Abbas

The presence of flavonoids such as chalcones, flavones, flavonols, anthocyanins, and proanthocyanidins is ubiquitous throughout the plant kingdom. It was previously believed that the oldest plants that produced flavonoids were liverworts and mosses. However, recent discoveries have found genes encoding enzymes in the shikimate pathway responsible for flavonoid biosynthesis in a variety of plants including algae, liverworts, mosses, lycophytes, ferns and horsetails, gymnosperms, and angiosperms. These genes include the first two enzymes for flavonoid biosynthesis, chalcone synthase and chalcone isomerase. Furthermore, recent research has found flavones, isoflavones, and flavonols in microalgae from five distinct evolutionary lineages(Cyanobacteria, Rhodophyta, Chlorophyta, Haptophyta, and Ochrophyta) using ultra-high performance liquid chromatography with tandem mass spectrometry. This implies that plants may have developed the capacity to make flavonoids earlier than previously believed. Flavonoids in the earliest plants that produced them were believed to have acted as protection against UV radiation and control of plant hormone activity. As plants evolved, these roles diversified, and the study of flavonoids has revealed how plants developed the capacity to produce a wide array of specialized metabolites and then evolved the metabolic pathways required to manufacture them. This book delves into the structural diversity of flavonoids found throughout the plant kingdom, the evolution of flavonoid biosynthesis genes in plants, and the molecular interaction of flavonoids with growth hormones. The metabolic routes of flavonoids are thoroughly investigated using both biochemical and molecular biology methods, and the book elucidates the links between genes/proteins and metabolites, as well as between metabolites. The book also explores the interplay between flavonoid metabolism and external environmental factors that are subject to continuous change.

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Flavonoid Metabolism

Edited by Hafiz Muhammad Khalid Abbas