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Pankaj Jaiswal
Assistant Professor, Botany and Plant Pathology
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RESEARCH:
My lab works on number of genomics aspects including the Comparative Plant Genomics, Functional genomics, Systems Biology, Genome Annotation, Biochemical and Regulatory Pathways, Genome Databases and Ontology Development.
The focus of my research program is to provide a systems biology platform that can be used by plant breeders, biochemists, cell biologists, molecular biologists and agronomists. Development of such a plant systems biology portal will help in supporting the validation and development of hypothetical models to carryout research for finding new gene function, marker assisted selection of genotype and phenotypes for use in breeding programs, genome annotation, finding novel metabolic and signaling pathways, plant gene networks and whole genome interactomes (gene-to-gene interactions), gene and phenotype expression profiles. The platform will help in developing and applying molecular tools for cereal crop improvement. This can be achieved by carefully organizing the information in a database that evolves around the sequenced genomes of rice as an anchor and its comparison to various crop plants via the linkages provided by genetic and genomics information. With the help of our collaborators, we use a combination of computational analysis, solicited datasets and manual annotation to present the information on the genomics and genetics information on various crops such as on the Gramene database (www.gramene.org) to discover and map new/known/candidate genes and/or QTLs, pathways and orthologous genes for identification of important agronomic traits of interest to develop new breeding strategies for the future.
We also work on creating a database of metabolic pathways in Rice called RiceCyc. This is a first of its kind pathway database dedicated to rice pathways. It allows researchers to find the rice genes and their role in given biochemical pathways. We are also looking at extending this model to include regulatory gene networks and pathways. The database website also mirrors pathways from 8-9 plant species for comparative analysis.