Dr. Avanish Rai

His Phd work focused on transcriptome mining, coupled with the combinatorial expression of terpenoid pathway enzymes in medicinal plants or in heterologous hosts such as tobacco or in the hairy-roots system. I was also involved in deciphering the role of drought stress in exacerbating dry root rot (DRR) disease caused by Macrophomina phaseolina in chickpea. At CPSBB, I will be evaluating a wide range of phenotypic, and metabolic traits followed by transcriptomic profiling in two genome-wide association (GWAS) panels and two backcrossed inbred lines (BILs) populations for both tomato and pepper. The identified genes will be subsequently validated by CRISPR-Cas9 editing technologies and field trials.