About
Nazrul Hisham Nazaruddin — Research Officer
Biotechnology & Nanotechnology Research Centre
Malaysian Agricultural Research and Development Institute (MARDI), Serdang, Selangor
What I do
I work on making crop improvement faster and more precise — and on making sure the results can actually be used.
Most of my time goes to CRISPR‑Cas9 genome editing in rice and tomato. That means designing dual guide RNA constructs, assembling them into Golden Gate vectors, delivering them into plants, and genotyping what comes out the other side. The goal throughout is a transgene‑clean, marker‑free edit: a plant that carries the change we wanted and nothing else. In rice the target is durable blast resistance; in tomato it is fruit quality traits like stay‑green and carotenoid content.
The second thread is enzymes. I work on a beta‑propeller phytase from a locally isolated Bacillus siamensis strain — the enzyme that frees phosphate from phytic acid. Get it right and animal feed uses phosphorus better and less of it ends up polluting waterways. That work runs from molecular screening through recombinant expression, nickel affinity purification, and activity assays tuned for neutral to alkaline conditions.
Tying them together is computational work: building marker‑gene phylogenies, modelling enzyme structures by homology, and mapping point substitutions onto the fold so that what we see in a sequence connects to what we measure at the bench. I have also contributed to genome and transcriptome assembly projects, including the first draft genome of the Malaysian stingless bee Heterotrigona itama.
Why I build tools
Genome editing has a teaching problem: the concepts are visual and stepwise, but most software is either a black box or a command line. So I write small browser‑based tools that show the intermediate steps — where the guide anneals, where Cas9 cuts, what the repaired sequence looks like. They run entirely client‑side, which means no install, no account, and no sequence ever leaving the user's machine. Students use them, and so do I.
Biosafety & compliance
Genome editing in Malaysia sits under the Biosafety Act 2007. I prepare institutional biosafety notifications, classify edits under the SDN‑1/2/3 framework, and support biosafety briefings for the institutional committee. It is unglamorous work, and it is the difference between an interesting result and a deployable one.
Collaboration
I am glad to hear from people working on plant genome editing, enzyme engineering, or computational genomics — whether that is a joint project, a student placement, or a question about one of the tools. The contact page has the details.