Ms. Sakshi Rampuria, PhD Research Scholar working under Prof. PB Kirti at the Department of Plant Sciences, University of Hyderabad has been awarded with Fulbright Nehru Doctoral Research Fellowship for the year 2016-2017. As Part of this she will be working on understanding the overlap and cross-talk between plant abiotic and biotic stress responses at University of Missouri, Columbia, USA for 9 months.
Ms. Rampuria’s current work concentrates on the study of the possible involvement of a chaperone, AdDnaJIII of Arachis diogoi in determining differential pathogen susceptibility and abiotic stress tolerance. As a Fulbright-Nehru Fellow, she would work towards the identification of proteins interacting with AdDnaJIII (both cohort and client) as well as analyzing AdDnaJIII homolog mutant of Arabidopsis thaliana with respect to stress phenotyping, transcriptome and proteome. This work will help in deciphering the molecular cross talk underlying plant stress related pathways and chaperone functioning; a step towards present agricultural need of robust plants that can combat more than one stresses occurring simultaneously in nature by genetically engineering a complete system of interacting proteins.
Previously Ms. Rampuria has worked for the NAIP project entitled “Bioprospecting of genes and allele mining for abiotic stress tolerance” at the National Research Center on Plant Biotechnology, IARI, New Delhi to do her Masters Dissertation project. She made two SSH cDNA libraries under heat stress in Vigna aconitifolia to identify genes that are differentially up-regulated at early stage of heat stress, and the results were published in peer-reviewed journals. Moreover, she was also awarded with the University gold medal during her Master’s Program for overall performance.
Outside the arena of work, Ms. Rampuria enjoys doing painting, reading fiction, watching movies, and listening to music.