Please join us in welcoming Surender Khatodia, Ph.D. to Klonetics as our Chief Tissue Culture Scientist. Surender will lead the scientific and technical operations of our commercial scale cannabis micropropagation to provide pathogen-free cannabis plant production. Surender brings over 15 years of extensive experience in plant tissue culture and genomics work on various crops. During the last three years, he has made progressive developments in optimizing the methods of pathogen eradication for clean clone production, genetic testing and germ-plasm conservation of the popular cannabis cultivars. He also coordinated a cannabis genomics project with NRC-IRAP and established an analytical testing laboratory for cannabinoids, microbial and genetic analysis. His deep passion for plant sciences escalated while working on hairy root cultures of medicinally important plants for enhancing secondary metabolites production.

Dr. Khatodia obtained his Ph.D. in Biotechnology and Molecular Biology, for the development of transgenic Bt chickpea plants and went on to teach Biotechnology at University. He worked as a postdoctoral researcher in Plant Sciences at University of Saskatchewan before starting as a consulting specialist for the cannabis industry and supporting Health Canada license applications and assisting clients with regulatory compliance. His academic background is centred around genetic improvement of plants for sustainable crop production by using biotechnological tools like tissue culture, molecular biology, genomics, and genome editing with CRISPR/Cas9 as evident with various scientific publications, co-edited books, and conference presentations.