Dr. Martin graduated from the University of Calicut, Kerala, India in 2001. He is a recipient of the prestigious UKEIRI-India research fellowship, and he performed his research to enhance the production of pharmaceutical compounds in medicinal plants using molecular techniques at De Montfort University, Leicester, UK. As a postdoctoral fellow, Dr. Martin continued his research at Blumwald Laboratory, University of California, Davis (2009-2014) and focused on developing abiotic stress-tolerant plants through genetic transformation. He started his research at KCGEB in 2014.
Research Summary:
Crop growth is severely affected by abiotic stresses such as drought, temperature, and salinity. The development of crops adaptable to stress conditions addresses agricultural productivity. Plants surviving the extreme adverse conditions of UAE are the potential sources of unique genetic determinants conferring tolerance to various abiotic stresses. Many genes enabling the plants to adapt to the stress conditions have been identified and cloned from the plants growing well in the UAE. The research focuses on the functional characterization of these genes as to the stress conditions and to be stacked to compete high to the stresses. Besides, promoters inducing the expression of the key genes conferring tolerance to different stresses have also been identified and cloned. The genes conferring tolerance to varying stresses under the control of these inducible promoters are used to develop genetically modified crops adaptable to different stresses. The strategies include genomics, proteomics, molecular biology, plant transformation, and metabolomics approaches to characterize the genes. The target crops are tomato, eggplant, peanut, quinoa, pearl millet, maize, black pepper, and date palm. In addition, the research on fruit crops focuses on flowering time, ripening, and other novel fruit traits.
CRISPR/Cas9, the designer nuclease, enables the switch-off of genes by knocking out or inserting new sequences with surgical precision at a specific site in the genome. This state-of-the-art Genome Editing technology has extensive practical applications in agriculture, such as developing new crop varieties, high-yielding crops tolerant to abiotic and biotic stresses, and fruits/vegetables/grains of high nutritional value. The research focuses on developing crops with high tolerance to abiotic stresses and fruits with improved quality using CRISPR/Cas and developed a high-yielding variety of eggplant through genome editing.
Team Members
Salima Al Senaani, Laboratory Specialist
Salima Al Senaani is a lab specialist at the Khalifa Center for Biotechnology and Genetic Engineering. She earned a Bachelor’s degree in Biology from UAEU in 2010. She joined the Khalifa Center for Biotechnology and Genetic Engineering in 2013 and, in the same year, enrolled in a specialized training program in plant biotechnology at the University of California, Davis, which greatly enhanced her knowledge of advanced biotechnology methods that she later integrated into her professional work. In 2018, she obtained a Master’s degree in Biotechnology. Salima works at the Khalifa Center on developing crops that are resistant to abiotic stresses such as drought and salinity, as well as improving the quality traits of fruits. She has also contributed to several research papers published in the fields of microbiome and field trials for bent grass.
Shina Sasi, Ph.D., Postdoctoral Fellow
Dr. Shina graduated in Applied Botany from Mangalore University, India, in 2018, and her doctoral research focused on accomplishing piper yellow mottle virus-free plants of black pepper. She served as a senior researcher at ICAR-Indian Institute of Spices Research. She worked on a Department of Biotechnology project funded by the Government of India that aimed to assess the virus resistance in transgenic black pepper. As a postdoctoral fellow at KCGEB, Dr. Shina focuses on developing abiotic and biotic-tolerant crops through transgenesis and genome editing, as well as functional studies using model plants.
Saranya Krishnan SR, Ph. D., Postdoctoral Fellow
Dr. Saranya Krishnan earned her Ph. D. in Botany from the University of Kerala, India, in 2017, focusing on scale-up production of pharmaceutical leads from medicinal plants through genetic modification. Following her graduate studies, she joined as an Assistant Professor at Mahatma Gandhi College, Kerala, India, where she taught and mentored bachelor and master students in plant science courses. Her present research as a postdoctoral fellow at KCGEB covers improving various crops through plant genetic transformation and genome editing. She focuses on functional studies of genes-of-interest in model systems, developing crops tolerant to abiotic stresses, and improving fruit quality traits.