Research Projects

Himalayan medicinal plants (HMP) have special importance due to their unique therapeutic properties and use in various traditional medicine systems. Limited availability and extensive use of HMP leading to decrease in their population at an alarming rate and placed most of them in RET plant category. Therefore, extensive efforts are being made to start their conservation and cultivation. During cultivation of these HMP, a major problem limiting their cultivation is their very long seed dormancy and poor seed germination. Therefore, several efforts have been made to break their seed dormancy and improve the seed germination. Now it has been revealed that seeds harbor microbes as endophytes with potential for plant growth improvement and as biocontrol agents. Role of seed microbes in seed dormancy and germination is unexplored. Seeds involve in two crucial phases of plant life including endpoint (seed maturation) and the starting point (seed germination) of life; therefore, seed endophytes have longest association with plant and having high possibility of selecting the promising microbial candidates, essential for different processes of plant life. Therefore, seed endophytes have special importance to understand the mechanism of plant-endophyte interaction. Role of endophytes was studied by several groups, that is mainly focused on to isolate endophytes and applying them to increase plant growth, secondary metabolite production, and protection from abiotic stress and pathogens. But molecular mechanism involved in plant-endophyte interaction is not much explored. What are the factors that make one microbe endophyte and the other non-endophyte? How endophytes established in seeds and transmitted from soil/leaf to seed and to the successive generation? What is role of seed endophytes in seed germination? These are the crucial questions that need to be investigated for a deep understanding of plant-endophyte interaction for their wide/effective application (for multiple crops and geographical locations). Presently, we are working on exploring endophytes of extremely important HMP (Rhodiola imbricata, Fritillaria roylei, Podophyllum hexandrum and Valeriana jatamansi) for improvement of plant growth and increase production of secondary metabolites. In the present proposal, we proposed to understand the role of seed-associated endophytes of these HMP in seed germination and associated metabolic regulation (differential metabolomics), identifying factors responsible for endophytic nature of endophytes (comparative whole genome sequencing), and to check the possibility of application of seed endophytes as synthetic microbial community to provide stress tolerance (stress experiments) to important food crops (maize, pea, soybean). The project will provide an understanding of the endophytic behavior of microbes and metabolic regulation during seed germination process of important HMP that will help to solve the poor seed germination problems of these plants.