Research Projects

India accounts for more than 70% of global chickpea production (Directorate of Economics and Statistics, 2019). Drought incurs huge damage to chickpea cultivation as it is largely grown as a rainfed crop in India (Sachdeva et al., 2022). While, “genomics –led” innovations have allowed identification of genomic regions governing drought tolerance trait in chickpea (Varshney et al., 2014; Kale et al., 2015; Bharadwaj et al., 2021; Barmukh et al., 2022), there is still very little that is known regarding the molecular intricacies existing in vivo which is responsible for tolerance to drought. While only about 3% of the genome is accounted by protein-coding genes, a substantial amount of genomic DNA is composed of what was previously referred to as “junk” DNA (Urquiaga et al., 2021). This largely consists of repetitive DNA elements and non-protein coding genes. The latter are transcribed into RNA which are not translated into proteins. With recent advances in high throughput sequencing technologies, we have been able to identify and characterize many non-coding RNAs which are regulatory in function and play an important role in regulating gene expression. The non-coding RNAs (ncRNAs) include a variety of RNAs. These can be categorized as the small ncRNAs (miRNAs, siRNAs) or the long ncRNAs (lncRNAs, circRNA). Each of these have been shown to contribute to a large degree in allowing plants to respond to external environmental conditions. Even though each of these ncRNA species have well-established roles in regulation of gene expression at both the transcriptional and post-transcriptional levels, very little is known about how they interact in planta to yield the desired changes. As we know nothing in biological system exists and functions in isolation. There exists a regulatory network which is responsible for controlling the expression of a gene and this network is constituted of diverse biological entities. In other words, it’s not only the sequence variation which is capable of altering a gene’s expression but many other factors over and above this. Epigenetic changes which involve changes in gene expression, which cannot be attributed to sequence variation but involve chemical modifications of DNA and histone proteins which are majority of times facilitated by several ncRNAs. These changes are more dynamic and responsive to environmental cues and allow plants to “quickly” adapt to the environment. If these changes are stable and transmitted to future generations are facets which are largely unexplored. Also, it is speculated that these changes can confer an adaptive memory to plants, an area which needs to be further investigated. We therefore believe that through this project we would gain novel and significant insights into how these variables interact in vivo to alter the target gene’s expression resulting in a desired phenotype.