Profile
Assistant Professor, Gujarat Biotechnology University, Gandhinagar, Gujarat (June 2023 - February 2024) Associate Fellow, The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI), New Delhi (September 2022 - June 2023) Rothamsted International Fellow, Rothamsted Research, UK (August 2021 - May 2022) DST-INSPIRE Faculty, National Agri-Food Biotechnology Institute (NABI), January 2018 - September 2022) Postdoctoral Fellow, Iowa State University, IA, USA (June 2015 - Nov 2017) PhD, Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Kharagpur (2010 - 2015)
Current Focus Areas
1. Genetic improvement of rice bran oil stability using genome editing. 2. Designing and assessing Indian oil seed mustard with a very high oleate content for healthy food and sustainable industrial applications using targeted genome editing
Selected Publications
Bhunia RK, Menard G and Eastmond P (2022). A native promoter–gene fusion created by CRISPR/Cas9-mediated genomic deletion offers a transgene-free method to drive oil accumulation in leaves. FEBS letters, 596: 1865-1870. https://doi.org/10.1002/1873-3468.14365
Verma L, Bhadouria J, Bhunia RK, Singh S, Panchal P, Bhatia C, Eastmond P, and Giri J (2022). Monogalactosyl diacylglycerol synthase 3 affects phosphate utilization and acquisition in rice. Journal of Experimental Botany, 73:5033-5051. https://doi.org/10.1093/jxb/erac192
Menard GN, Langdon M, Bhunia RK, Shankhapal AR, Noleto-Dias C, Lomax C, Ward JL, Kurup S, and Eastmond PJ. (2022) Diverting phenylpropanoid pathway flux from sinapine to produce industrially useful 4-vinyl derivatives of hydroxycinnamic acids in Brassicaceous oilseeds. Metabolic Engineering, 70: 196-205. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ymben.2022.01.016.
Bhunia RK, Sinha K, Chawla K, Randhawa V and Sharma TR. (2020) Functional characterization of two type-1 diacylglycerol acyltransferase (DGAT1) genes from rice (Oryza sativa) embryo restoring the triacylglycerol accumulation in yeast. Plant Molecular Biology. 105:247–262. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11103-020-01085-w
Bhunia RK, Showman L, Jose A and Nikolau B. (2018) Combined use of cutinase and high resolution mass-spectrometry to query the molecular structure of cutin. Plant Methods, 14:117. https://doi.org/10.1186/s13007-018-0384-6.