Shreenivas Kumar Singh: The Plant Cell First Author

Shreenivas Kumar Singh, first author of “The nuclear effector ArPEC25 from the necrotrophic fungus Ascochyta rabiei targets the chickpea transcription factor CaβLIM1a and negatively modulates lignin biosynthesis, increasing host susceptibility”

Current Position: Postdoctoral research fellow in the lab of Prof. Emmanuelle Graciet at Maynooth University, Ireland.

Education: Ph.D. at National Institute of Plant Genome Research, India; M.Sc in Biotechnology from Vellore Institute of Technology, India; B.Sc in Biotechnology from Lovely Professional University, India.

Non-scientific Interest: Cooking, movies and meditation

Brief bio:

My research field is plant pathogen interaction. For my Ph.D. I joined the Plant Immunity Laboratory at National Institute of Plant Genome Research, under the supervision of Professor Praveen K. Verma. My work mainly focused on the investigation of molecular mechanism of Aschochyta blight diseases in Cicer arietinum. We identified and characterized the necrotrophic nuclear effector ArPEC25 from Ascochyta rabiei and its host target, CaβLIM1a (which is a transcription factor) from C. arietinum. We are now very happy to publish our work in ‘The Plant Cell’. Here we have shown that fungal effector render host susceptible by intervening the lignin biosynthetic pathway. As a post-doc in Prof. Graciet’s lab, I am currently working on the molecular mechanism of combined stress of hypoxia and Sclerotinia sclerotiorum in Brassica rapa.