Microbiome and Genomics Lab

Background:

Plants are key natural resources that provide food, medicine and economic opportunities to human beings. We can develop plant resources using biotechnology approaches to improve the benefits associated with them. One of the key question is that how can we improve plant abilities to resist stressful conditions (such as low or higher water availibities) through understanding genes, biomolecules, and metabolites. One of the key resource is “Microbes” that are associated with plants and provide them with unprecedented amount of benefits including resitance to stress, mobilizing nutrients into roots, and 

producing beneficial substances (enzymes and metabolites). Utilizing a total sum of microbes associated with plants can increase opportunities for reducing fertilizer input (less $ spent on growing crop plants) and improving biomass that could be essential for developing various products (such as animal feed, bioethanol, food, etc). Hence, using microbiome approaches we can tackle abiotic stresses and productivity issues. 

Our Lab Approach:

• Adopting naturally occuring microbes to develop a biobank of stress – competant microbes that can improve plant growth, biomass, and yeild 
• Understanding microbiome structure, diversity and function with plants and developing ways to enrich rhizosphere with synthetic microbiome
• 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
• Understanding the genomics and evolutionary history of unique ecologically, medicinally and economically important plants

Areas of Research: