Profile
Synthetic biology has opened various paths for abundant production of biologics as well as crop improvement. Synthetic promoter plays a crucial role for manipulating genetic architecture of plants to promotor synthetic biology. Our lab focuses on functional characterization of synthetic promoters for developing stress resilient plants and production of essential biologics in plants. Alongside owing to the importance of the transcription factors (TFs) that play a crucial role in stress tolerance in plants, we are working to functionally characterize several plant transcription factors such as WRKY, MYB, bZIP, NAC, THX, and DoF families under diverse stress conditions to unveil the genetic regulation, network, crosstalk and mechanism between them. Information from these studies guided us to develop biotic and abiotic stress tolerant plants in rice, millet and wheat that have potential to enhance the crop production under sustainable conditions.
Current Focus Areas
We are currently focusing on following studies; 1) Development of efficient genetic tools coupled to unique pararetroviral based synthetic promoter for plant modification. 2) Genetic manipulation of transcription factors in context to unveiling underline mechanism and crosstalk between different TFs towards development of modified crop plants with enhanced productivity.
Selected Publications
1. Jha DK, Chanwala J, Barla P and Dey N (2024) “Genome-wide identification of bZIP gene family in Pearl millet and transcriptional profiling under abiotic stress, phytohormonal treatments; and functional characterization of PgbZIP9”. Front. Plant Sci. 15:1352040. doi: 10.3389/fpls.2024.1352040 2. Chanwala J, Jha DK, Giri MK, Dey N (2024). “PgWRKY44, a pearl millet WRKY transcription factor-Calmodulin module, enhances salt and drought stress resilience in transgenic plants” Environmental and Experimental Botany, Volume 219, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envexpbot.2023.105629. 3. Sherpa T, Jha DK, Kumari K, Chanwala J, Dey N. Synthetic sub-genomic transcript promoter from Horseradish Latent Virus (HRLV). Planta. 2023 Jan 18; 257 (2):40. 4. Sethi, L., Deb, D., Khadanga, B., Dey, N. (2021). Synthetic promoters from blueberry red ringspot virus (BRRV). Planta 253, 121. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00425-021-03624-1. 5. Khan, A., Shrestha, A., Bhuyan, K., Maiti, I. B., & Dey, N. (2018). Structural characterization of a novel full-length transcript promoter from Horseradish Latent Virus (HRLV) and its transcriptional regulation by multiple stress responsive transcription factors. Plant molecular biology, 96(1-2), 179-196. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11103-017-0693-6.