Key Research Areas

Research Interests

• Molecular mechanisms of calcium-mediated stress responses in rice

Research Overview

Because stress responses are mediated by complex networks of cell signaling, understanding mechanisms of how plants perceive and transmit stress signals and how the functional and regulatory proteins contribute to the tolerance require knowledge of a genome scale. Currently, we have sequenced the exomes of nearly 200 local Thai rice varieties using the next generation sequencing. The exome was captured using capture probes designed based on all rice genes and the promoters of salt stress related and responsive genes. The resulting genotypes are associated with various phenotypes relating to salt stress responses to identify salt-tolerant genes. The second omic approach that we use is transcriptomics analysis to generate comparative transcriptome profiles between rice or Arabidopsis overexpressing genes of interest when grown under salt stress. Currently, we are working on a family of calcium -binding proteins, calmodulin (CaM) in rice and trying to determine whether and how they contribute to stress tolerance.