Research Projects

This project aims to investigate how freshwater diatoms evolve and function in response to environmental stressors across fragmented tropical stream ecosystems in the Western Ghats. Despite their vital role in aquatic ecosystems, diatom communities in India remain poorly characterized at the genomic and trait levels, especially in tropical regions facing increasing land-use change, pollution, and hydrological fragmentation. The fundamental hypothesis of this study is that certain diatom lineages exhibit lineage-specific genomic flexibility and trait plasticity that enable them to adapt to environmental gradients, and that these patterns can be detected through integrative ecological, morphological, and genome-wide approaches. To test this, the project will pursue three key objectives: (1) document how diatom community composition and diversity shift along pollution, land-use, and fragmentation gradients; (2) identify genome-wide variation and genotype–environment associations in dominant taxa such as Gomphonema and Nitzschia; and (3) evaluate how ecological and morphological traits relate to environmental stress, and whether they are conserved or plastic across lineages. The research will employ a combination of field sampling, environmental measurements, microscopy, amplicon barcoding, Pool-seq, RAD-seq, and trait–genomic modeling. Expected outcomes include the generation of the first eco-genomic dataset for Indian freshwater diatoms, identification of adaptive genetic markers, and the development of a publicly accessible database integrating genomic, trait, and environmental metadata for tropical taxa. This study will significantly advance fundamental understanding of microbial evolution in tropical freshwater systems, provide new tools for ecological monitoring, and offer a scalable framework for biodiversity conservation in fragmented ecosystems.