Pratheek Pandesha

Program: Plant and Microbial Biosciences

Current advisor: R. Keith Slotkin, PhD

Undergraduate university: University of Agricultural Sciences – Bangalore, 2018

Enrollment year: 2021

Research summary

Epigenetic regulation is crucial for maintenance of genome integrity and DNA methylation is a hallmark for silencing in the genome.In plants early establishment of DNA methylation is governed by RNA-directed DNA Methylation (RdDM) of Cytosine bases. Plants are able to silence newly jumped transposons and transgenes, but the initial triggers of de novo RdDM remain unknown. My work aims to identify and characterize the primary small RNAs that trigger RNAi, RdDM and downstream feedforward cycles of epigenetic silencing.

Graduate publications
Liu P, Panda K, Edwards SA, Swanson R, Yi H, Pandesha P, Hung YH, Klaas G, Ye X, Collins MV, Renken KN, Gilbertson LA, Veena V, Hancock CN, Slotkin RK.. 2024 Transposase-assisted target-site integration for efficient plant genome engineering. Nature, 631(8021):593-600. PMCID: PMC11254759