Biological and Life Sciences

Professor Pathak received her PhD from the University of Arkansas in Cell and Molecular Biology in 2019. She holds dual Masters in Biotechnology and Agronomy from Sardar Patel University and the University of Florida respectively. Before joining Ahmedabad University, she was a programme associate at the University of Arkansas, where she worked on the identification of target genes for the transgene transcription factor introduced in rice through transcriptomic and physiological approaches.
 

Her research primarily focuses on the development and testing of tools to assist plant breeders in the introduction of novel traits in crop improvement. These tools utilise biotechnology approaches of gene stacking and genome editing. In the genome editing, using CRISPR/Cas9, with rice as a model system, her team showed that point mutagenesis in the form of single base additions/deletions (indels) occur at greater frequency than big deletions (Pathak et al., 2019). The controlled approach of Cas9 expression is more desirable than its constitutive expression, as the constitutive expression leads to more off-target effects than the controlled expression (Nandy and Pathak et al., 2019).  Her research at Ahmedabad University will focus on optimising, evaluating and testing the feasibility of these novel tools used in genome editing and gene stacking before their integration in the mainstream of crop improvement of oil seed crops, which are a primary focus of Gujarat region.

• Pathak B and Srivastava V (2020). Recombinase‐mediated integration of a multigene cassette in rice leads to stable expression and inheritance of the stacked locus. Plant Direct 4: 1-10 
• Nandy S*, Pathak B*, Zhao S and Srivastava (2019). Heat-shock inducible CRISPR/Cas9 system generates heritable mutations in rice. Plant Direct. May 3; (5):e00145. 
• Pathak B, Zhao S, Manoharan M, and Srivastava V (2019). Dual-targeting by CRISPR/Cas9 leads to efficient point mutagenesis but only rare targeted deletions in the rice genome. 3 Biotech. Apr 1; 9(4):158. 
• Pathak BP, Pruett E, Guan H, and Srivastava V (2019). Utility of I-Sce I and CCR5-ZFN nucleases in excising selectable marker genes from transgenic plants. BMC Research Notes. Dec 12; (1):272. 
• Zhao Y, Kim JY, Karan R, Jung JH, Pathak B, Williamson B, Kannan B, Wang D, Fan C, Yu W, Dong S, Srivastava V and Altpeter F (2019). Generation of a selectable marker free, highly expressed single copy locus as landing pad for transgene stacking in sugarcane. Plant Molecular Biology. Jun 1; 1-7. 
• Zale J, Jung JH, Kim JY, Pathak B, Karan R, Chen X, Wu H, Lui H, Candreva J, Zhai Z, Shanklin J and Altpeter F (2016). Metabolic engineering of sugarcane to accumulate energy-dense triacylglycerols in vegetative biomass. Plant Biotechnology. Feb 14 ;( 2) 661-669. 
• Nandy S, Zhao S, Pathak BP, Manoharan M and Srivastava V (2015). Gene stacking in plant cell using recombinases for gene integration and nucleases for marker gene deletion. BMC Biotechnology. Dec; 15(1):93. 
• Jain M*, Pathak BP*, Harmon AC, Tillman BL and Gallo M (2011). Calcium dependent protein kinase (CDPK) expression during fruit development in cultivated peanut (Arachis hypogaea) under Ca2+-sufficient and -deficient growth regimens, Journal of Plant Physiology. Dec 15; 168(18):2272-7. 

*Equal contributing authors