Projects

Analyzing data from the Plasticity Project, I am working to understand how suberized barriers form and provide resilience to rice plants in response to multiple stresses.

Gene regulatory networks shape developmental plasticity of root cell types under water extremes in rice

I connected the evolutionary history of developmental regulatory transcription factors to asexual sporulating structure morphology in Pezizomycotina fungi. In collaboration with Anita Sil's Lab at UCSF.

Recurrent loss of abaA, a master regulator of asexual development in filamentous fungi, correlates with changes in genomic and morphological traits

Mentor: Dr. Matt Mead

I used alien index calculations and phylogenetics to identify candidate horizontal gene transfer events in Selaginella moellendorffii and Physcomitrella patens. I presented this work in a poster at the Vanderbilt Undergraduate Poster Fair.

Mentor: Dr. Jen Wisecaver

I used the bioinformatics program antiSMASH to predict putative specialized biosynthetic gene clusters in a range of plant genomes. Next, I used the co-expression database ATTED-II to assess the co-expression of these putative clusters and the co-expression of known clusters. I found that very few of the predicted clusters showed patterns of co-expression while co-expression validated known clusters. In conclusion, I found that while genomic clustering exists, is not as powerful as co-expression in identifying novel plant metabolic pathways. This work is part of the publication, A Global Coexpression Network Approach for Connecting Genes to Specialized Metabolic Pathways in Plants.

Mentor: Dr. Jen Wisecaver