Research

Evolutionarily plants have adopted a sessile habit to sustain in an environment. This immobile nature has made plants to evolve an intricate sensing and signaling network in response to both favorable and unfavorable conditions. The adaptive and defense machinery of plants consists of a plethora of networks or pathways, which ultimately help in activating and responding against these stresses. Calcium act as a central player in most of the signaling in all eukaryotes, be it physiological or developmental processes. One of the most important phenomenon calcium regulates is the signal transduction network for sensing and responding to environmental stimuli. In the calcium mediated signaling network, a change in calcium concentration is designated as “calcium signature” upon sensing a stimuli which is being sensed by a plethora of calcium sensors such as Calmodulin, CDPK, and CBL-CIPK networks in plants.

My group is studying the role of several downstream components in calcium signaling, which might be working in concert with calcium sensors/relay, and ultimately acting as effectors in modulating a response either by change in gene expression or direct physiological regulation. Some of the key players we are extensively investigating are calcium sensors, kinases, phosphatases, transcription factors and transporters/ channels to understand the calcium signaling mechanism in plants.

In near future, we wanted to investigate the detail mechanistic interplay and cross talk of different signaling cascades with calcium signaling network in Arabidopsis and rice model system under different stress conditions. The interaction of several pathways to converge and diverge at some points will be investigated by using the advanced tools of functional genomics and proteomics where several networks can be mapped collectively as “Signaling Interactome under Stress Conditions”.