What's going on in the lab

The extreme conditions in the Thar desert provide an all-round challenge for the survival of plants, which experience a combination of drought, heat, high light intensity, UV and nutrient deficiency stresses. Understanding plant tolerance mechanisms to environmental stress is of utmost importance to develop resilient crops, to meet future demand in the face of climate change and increasing desertification and soil degradation. We work on Arabidopsis, a high throughput state-of-the-art model system for fundamental research in plant science having thousands of genotyped ecotypes and millions of Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms (SNPs). We use genome-wide association studies (GWAS) as a forward genetic tool to unravel the quantitative trait loci (QTLs) and expression-level polymorphisms (ELPs) associated with multiple abiotic stress tolerance in plants. We conduct phenotyping in a hydroponic growth system manipulated to study different stresses. The genes identified by GWAS make way for detailed functional genomics studies using reverse genetics and transgenic approaches. Further, we use GWAS to identify genetic and epigenetic loci responsible for stress memory in plants. We also use genomic and metagenomic tools to identify unknown mechanisms of stress adaptation in extremophile species from the Thar desert.