Friday, January 16th, 2015 
10:00 AM, 2045 Bainer Hall 

Topic: "Towards Harnessing the Crop of the Future: Insight into C4 grain amaranth Genome" 

Speaker: Dr. Subhashini Srinivasan 
Institute of Bioinformatics and Applied Biotechnology Bangalore, India 

Abstract 
Grain amaranths, called as the 'crop of the future' by a US NRC council report, have recently gained a lot of interest in the research community for their unique traits. The species belong to the plant order Caryophyllales and are characterized by small life cycle of 3-4 months, small genome size of around 500 Mb, good adaptability to varied climatic conditions, resistance to drought stress, high biomass production, high yield with 40,000-60,000 seeds per plant, high nutritional value especially with almost 5% of lysine per gram of the dry weight of the edible seeds, special bright pigments called betalains and C4 type of carbon assimilation mechanism, to name a few. The species are the only edible C4 dicots known till date and have been under continued cultivation in India and some other parts of the world. Despite being of such high economic and agronomic importance, the species, in fact the whole plant order, had been under neglect by the scientific community for long. The grain amaranths demand an introspection/ a deeper understanding of the genome in the era of genome sequencing. We have sequenced the whole genome and transcriptomes of Amaranthus hypochondriacus indigenous to North Karnataka in India and have reported the draft assemblies of the same. Our interest lies in understanding the genomic construction responsible for the unique traits of the edible amaranths and the closer relatives under Caryophyllales. Here, we would like to share our findings and discuss our research developments in this regard. 

Coffee and cookies will be served.