Understanding Oil accumulation in non-seed tissues: A Translational Bioinformatics approach
Date
Tuesday 22 March 2016
Time
12:30 to 13:30
Speaker
Uday Divi, Postdoctoral Fellow, CSIRO Agriculture
Synopsis
Modern society relies heavily on mineral oil for both energy and petrochemical needs. Depletion in the current supply of traditional fossil based fuels, and increasing environmental concerns has driven the interest in alternative energy production. High biomass crops engineered for increased lipid content in vegetative tissues such as leaves have been proposed as a novel platform for meeting global production needs for low cost, energy-dense lipids such as triacylglycerol (TAG). We have achieved significant levels of TAG by engineering genes and gene combinations in both a transient and stable expression platforms. To further explore these systems and to understand the molecular responses underlying these manipulations, high throughput transcriptomic approaches were undertaken. The results provided important mechanistic insights into high oil and other phenotypes observed in these systems. We then expanded this work to study non-seed tissues that naturally accumulate oil. Chines tallow is potential biofuel crop that accumulates oil in both seed and an external tallow layer. Histological, biochemical and transcriptomic studies have identified the tallow layer as a lipid accumulating non-seed tissue with distinct TAG storage and synthesis mechanisms from that of seed. In my talk, I will discuss results from all the three non-seed lipid accumulating systems.
Bio
I have completed a PhD at the University of Western Ontario, Canada, where I worked on the Brassinosteroid mediated stress tolerance in plants. I have studied gene expression changes using microarrays and developed an interest in systems biology approaches. After that, I have spent some time at the McGill University, Canada researching on plant cell walls, mucilage synthesis and secretion, and NGS mapping of a mucilage secretion gene. In November 2011, I moved to CSIRO to work under Dr Surinder Singh in the oils group to decipher oil accumulation genes and pathways in systems engineered to make oil. I have expanded this work to characterize a potential biofuel crop accumulating oil in non-seed tissues. The outcomes of these projects are expected to help in identifying novel approaches to increase oil content in high biomass plant tissues.