About Us
Crops, Physiology, Microbiome
The accumulation of atmospheric CO2 entraps solar radiations emitted back to the earth's surface and increases global temperature known as global warming. This, in turn, develops a pattern of climate change termed Global Climate Change. The increased atmospheric CO2 is due to extensive industrialization, urbanization, and natural resource use patterns that have drastically created an imbalance in the environmental system.
Abiotic stresses such as increase or decrease in temperature, lack or abundance of water, changes in nutrients, and essential chemical composition of soil and water can influence an ecosystem's natural resource cycling system. Plants, a necessary part of human resources for food, shelter, and income, have been drastically impacted.
These changes have hindered the desired natural productivity of plants and their niche in the ecosystem, threatening food security and human use values for future generations.
Utilizing the microbial resources of untapped extreme natural environments could help to identify competent microbes that can be used to improve plant stress tolerance in climate change scenarios.
The Microbiome and Genomics lab is a research facility that investigates the diversity and function of microbiome that is associated with plant and soil. Our researchers explore how environmental factors impact the microbiome function by studying the genomics, transcriptomics and metabolomics.
Areas of Research:
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Microbiome role and function in plants in changing climatic conditions
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Plant and microbial genetic engineering for improved stress tolerance and nutrient uptake
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Plant and Microbial Genomics to understand growth and stress environments
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Soil microbiome for nutrient cycling and management
Our Lab Approach:
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Adopting nature-friendly approaches to improve plant growth, productivity, and stress tolerance against changing global climatic conditions. Major climatic factors include plants and microbes to high and low temperatures, nutrients, water, and hazardous contaminants
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Utilizing native and stress-fit microbial symbionts that enhance the yield of plants. This helps to understand the underlying molecular mechanisms involved in the complexity of plant-microbe-stress-interactions
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Integrating field and greenhouse-based studies, multi-omics (metagenomics, transcriptomics, genomics, and metabolomics), microbiome networking, and physio-molecular mechanisms to elucidate the complexity of plant-microbiome and stress-interactions
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Understanding the genomics and evolutionary history of unique ecologically, medicinally and economically important plants