Pradeep Kumar Jain

Biography

Ph.D.- Plant Molecular Biology (Delhi Univ. South Campus) Post Doc- Univ. of California, Riverside, USA

Research Interest

I work on two plant systems, chickpea, a legume and Arabidopsis, a model plant.Chickpea is the integral part of the daily diet of majority of the population. The yield of chickpea has not improved with time because of a number of stresses (both biotic and abiotic) severely affecting the productivity. Our group is trying to understand drought tolerance and wilt resistance in chickpea using the tools of functional genomics. We have generated thousands of expressed sequence tags (ESTs) by suppression subtraction hybridization (SSH) to identify differentially expressed genes in drought-tolerant/wilt resistant and drought susceptible/wilt susceptible genotypes in chickpea. Several genes like ERF, NAC, DREB etc. have been characterized in detail. Of late, microRNAs have emerged as major players in gene regulation. We have identified and characterized salt- and wilt-stress responsive microRNAs for the first time. We are also using mapping population(s) for identifying genes/QTL involved in drought tolerance and wilt resistance.