Jaiswal Lab

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Projects and Research Area

Welcome! Our primary research focus is the study of flowering time and seed development in plants. These two processes determine reproductive timing and fruit/seed generation, contributing to human and animal nutritional needs by way of quality and yield. We examine these developmental features in the context of plant response under conditions of abiotic stress such as salt, drought and photoperiod.

The Jaiswal Lab trains young scientists and students to cutting-edge technologies in genome sequencing, gene expression, plant development and bioinformatics. We have a substantial research and training program in interdisciplinary computational biology and plant development. We are also an affiliate of the Molecular and Cellular Biology Graduate Program at OSU. We collaborate extensively with computational biologists on campus and are directly involved in multi-institutional projects such as Plant Ontology, the Gramene database and several plant genome projects.

Our current projects include the genome-wide mapping of genomic/genetic loci (genes) in rice and triticeae that control expression and intergenic interactions regulating raits like flowering time and seed development and response to drought and salinity abiotic stresses. We use both molecular and genetic analytical techniques (i.e. genetic diversity, mutant phenotypes, genome sequences, gene expression (transcriptomes), comparative genomics and bioinformatics) to provide mechanistic insights into plant development and adaptation in the face of global climate change.

Various lab projects include:

Gramene Database

    Project Website: http://www.gramene.org


    It is a comparative plant genomics platform and a Systems Biology database. This is the first such database that allows researchers to carryout in-silico investigation using either or both the forward and reverse genetics approaches to find the genes, proteins, phenotypes, function, expression, gene-gene interaction, metabolic pathways and polymorphic markers in the region of interest. It also allows researchers to make comparisons across genetic maps, genomes and gene orthologs.

Planteome

    Project website: http://www.planteome.org


    The project is developing common gene annotation standards and a universal vocabulary of plant biology and stresses, including diseases. It will also draw up standards and workflows for the creation and curation of such terminology. Additionally, the project is developing a web portal and data warehouse to host this shared vocabulary and related annotation information to enable access by the broader plant community to access cutting-edge data resources for analyzing plant traits, phenotypes, diseases, genomes, genetic diversity and gene expression data across a wide range of plant species.

Plant Reactome

    Project Website: http://plantreactome.gramene.org


    Plant Reactome is a freely accessible database of plant metabolic and regulatory pathways. Our goal is to provide plant researchers tools for visualization, interpretation and analysis of pathway knowledge to support basic research, genome analysis, modeling, systems biology and education.

Plant metabolic pathways database

    Project Website: http://www.gramene.org/pathway


    A database of metabolic pathways in several reference plant species with sequenced genomes. This is a first of its kind pathway database built using the Pathway Tools. It allows researchers to find the genes and their role in given metabolic pathways. The database website provides dta produced in our project on rice, maize, sorghum and Brachypodium and also mirrors pathways from several other plant species like Arabidopsis and Solanaceae for comparative analysis.

Plant Ontology

    Website: http://www.plantontology.org


    It is a project on development of structured common set of plant anatomy and growth stage vocabularies for use in Genomics data sets, gene and phenotype annotations. The project also provides standard protocols and the database for ontology based annotations.

WikiPathways Collaboration

    Project Website: http://www.wikipathways.org


    An open, public platform for curation of biological pathways by and for the scientific community. We collaborate with the WikiPathways project on curating plant pathways.

Plant Genome Annotation

    We routinely collaborate on performing functional annotation of plant genomes such as those of following species. These annotations include, phylogenetic analysis of gene orthologs and paralogs, Gene Ontology based functional assignments to genes and developing metabolic and regulatory networks of genes.

    • Fragaria vesca (strawberry)
    • Vitis vinifera (grape)
    • Eucalyptus grandis (Eucalyptus)
    • Zea mays (maize/corn)
    • Brachypodium
    • Sorghum