Genomics and Bioinformatics are rapidly evolving disciplines of Biology generating an unprecedented amount of information about gene function and organization of the cell. My research focuses on the molecular mechanisms of host-pathogen interactions using genomics and systems level approaches. I am broadly interested in interdisciplinary research projects at the interface of genomics/systems biology of plant and human immunity using wet lab and computational approaches. Specifically, I aim to understand how macromolecular immune networks are organized in the cells and how these networks can be perturbed to cause diseases. To answer these questions, I work with the model dicot plant Arabidopsis thaliana.
My main interest is the computational modeling of gene regulatory networks, discovery of novel cis-regulatory motifs involved in plant immunity, in silico isolation of functional modules comprising transcription factors and cohorts of co-regulated genes, as well as providing empirical and experimental proofs of my computational/mathematical data in vivo. Moreover, I am also interested in generating large-scale immune interactome maps and understanding how pathogens perturb communications among key functional modules. The main projects that we are currently investigating are:
Systems level approaches to generate host-pathogens protein-protein interaction networks using proteins from Arabidopsis as well as from diverse viral, bacterial, and oomycete pathogens.
Generation of a large-scale Arabidopsis immune transcriptional regulatory network.
