Anish Kundu: Plant Physiology First Author

Anish Kundu, first author of “Piriformospora indica recruits host-derived putrescine for growth promotion in plants”

Current Position: Postdoctoral Fellow at NIPGR (National institute of a Plant Genome Research), New Delhi, India.

Education: PhD in Plant Biology, Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Kharagpur, India

Non-scientific Interests: Painting, reading books, writing and spending time in the lap of nature.

Brief bio: I became interested in biology during the high school study; therefore, I graduated as a student with BSc in Microbiology. Thereafter, I completed my masters in Biotechnology from the University of Burdwan, India in 2008. In 2009 I joined for my PhD at Indian institute of Technology Kharagpur, India under supervision of Prof. Adinpunya Mitra. In my doctoral work, I focused on secondary metabolism of medicinal plant, Hemidesmus indicus, where I characterized biosynthetic pathway of a fragrant methoxybenzaldehyde in H. indicus root.  Next, I joined for a brief postdoctoral study at University of Saskatchewan, Canada in 2014 and after returning to India I joined Dr. Jyothilakshmi Vadassery’s group at NIPGR, New Delhi in 2016 and started working on Tomato defense metabolomics against Spodoptera litura herbivory. We then decided to look at the interaction of growth promoting fungi Piriformospora indica with Tomato and metabolites involved in the process, which forms the results in the current Plant Physiology paper. Currently, I am working on metabolic alteration in the plant during interaction with P. indica and insect herbivore. I aspire to start my own lab and use my expertise in metabolomics and chemical ecology to expedite novel discoveries in plant biotic interactions