Agriculture & Horticulture

Biography

Bhattacharyya is engaged in studying the sudden death syndrome (SDS) in soybean. SDS is an emerging disease caused by the fungal pathogen, Fusarium virguliforme. The Bhattacharyya group has recently purified a phytotoxin produced by the pathogen. They have shown that expression of a synthetic single chain variable fragment anti-toxin antibody gene against the toxin resulted in enhanced foliar SDS resistance in transgenic soybean plants. Understanding the molecular basis of the soybean-P. sojae interaction is also a goal of the Bhattacharyya lab. The lab investigates two important aspects of this interaction: i) the recognition and ii) the signal transduction. These processes activate defense genes involved in the synthesis of anti-microbial defense compounds following infection. Bhattacharyya group is also involved in understanding the nonhost resistance mechanism of Arabidopsis against the soybean pathogen, P. sojae. They have been able to map and clone Pss1 and Pss30 that confer immunity of Arabidopsis to P. sojae. They have shown that Pss1 confers immunity not only against P. sojae, but also against the fungal pathogen F. virguliforme that causes SDS in soybean.

Research Interest

Agronomy Department Genetics and Genomics Plant Biology Center for Plant Responses to Environmental Stresses Molecular, Cell, and Developmental Biology Bioinformatics and Computational Biology Microbiology