Profile
My research is deeply inspired by the historic innovations that led to the domestication of modern-day crop plants. However, I am equally astonished by the fact that out of estimated 30,000 edible plant species on this planet, we only cultivate about 150 of them with >70% of our calories coming from merely 15 crops. Further, >50% of these calories are contributed by only three cereal crops namely, rice, maize, and wheat. It is high time now for us to revisit these choices in the wake of increasing population, declining resources, changing climate as well as nutritional requirements. With an overall aim to facilitate de novo domestication of underutilized millets with nutri-cereal potential, my research leverages the synergism of plant biotechnology and computational biology to investigate the impact of non-coding RNAs and their biogenesis machinery on plant reproduction, climate resilience and productivity.
Current Focus Areas
Identification and characterization of male germline/gametophyte-specific promoters in sorghum
CRISPR-mediated editing of small RNA-biogenesis machinery to engineer male fertility in an environment-dependent manner
Characterization of long non-coding RNAs associated with apomixis and seed development
Genetic modification of Sorghum for improved yield, nutritional value, and abiotic stress tolerance
Integration of RNAseq and smallRNA seq to determine key determinants of grain attributes in sorghum
Selected Publications
Jain R, Dhaka N, Yadav P, Sharma MK, Danish M, Sharma S, Kumari S, Vashisht I, Singh RKB, Sharma R. Integrated analysis of transcriptomic and small RNA sequencing data provides miRNA candidates for engineering agronomically important seed traits in Brassica juncea. Current Plant Biology 2023 Sept 2023, 35-36; 100306.
Rodrigues JA, Hsieh PH, Ruan D, Nishimura T, Sharma MK, Sharma R, et al (2021) Divergence among rice cultivars reveals roles for transposition and epimutation in ongoing evolution of genomic imprinting. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA, 118 (29) e2104445118.
Lovell et al,. (2021) Genomic mechanisms of climate adaptation in polyploid bioenergy switchgrass. Nature 590 (7846), 438-444.
Wierbowski SD, Vo TV, Falter-Braun P, Jobe TO, Kruse LH, Wei X, Liang J, Meyer MJ, Akturk N, Rivera-Erick CA, Cordero NA, Paramo MI, Shayhidin EE, Bertolotti M, Tippens ND, Akther K, Sharma R, et al (2020) A massively parallel barcoded sequencing pipeline enables generation of the first single-colony ORFeome and high-quality protein-protein interactome map for rice Proc Natl Acad Sci USA, Vol 117, 21.
Dhaka N., Sharma S., Vashisht I., Kandpal M., Sharma MK. and Sharma R. (2019) Small RNA profiling from meiotic and post-meiotic anthers reveals prospective miRNA-target modules for engineering male fertility in sorghum. Genomics, 112 (2), 1598-1610.