Shree Prakash Panday
Biological Sciences, Indian Institute of Science Education and Research Kolkata, India
Plants face a plethora of biotic stresses in their agro-ecological environments. Responses of plants tailored to these stresses involve perception, processing and integration of external information into cellular and physiological machinery. This involves elicitation of complex signaling networks. But hese signaling networks remain poorly characterized in crop species such as wheat. Moreover, other than the involvement of some transcription factors (TFs), how cellular signaling is modulated during attack of fungal pathogens and herbivores remains poorly understood even in model plants. On the other hand, small regulatory RNAs (smRNAs), such as microRNAs, have appeared as master regulators of cellular signaling events in processes such as development and differentiation. Our functional studies on components small RNA machinery suggest that smRNA biogenesis pathways have evolved in specialized manner during adaptation to specific stresses. Use the Argonaute (AGO) proteins (the central component of the smRNA pathways) as candidates for studying evolution of smRNA pathways; we conclude that the evolution of smRNA pathways has been a dynamic process that could generate signatures of their diversification of function in plants. We have extended our investigations to the wheat genomes to identify, annotate and understand signaling pathways and to determine phyloenetic linkages in other grass genomes. Our results have direct implications for biotechnological applications for crop improvement in cereals in general and wheat in particular.
Keywords: Phytohormone signaling, small RNA, miRNA, transcription factor, stress adaptation.