Rakesh Kaundal

co-author of "Alien Gene Transfer in Crop Plants: Innovations, Methods and Risk Assessment"

February 4, 2014

Dr. Rakesh Kaundal joined the Oklahoma State University faculty in early 2011 as a research scientist of bioinformatics in the National Institute for Microbial Forensics & Food and Agricultural Biosecurity (NIMFFAB) and the Department of Biochemistry & Molecular Biology. Earlier, Dr. Kaundal served as a postdoctoral research fellow at The Samuel Roberts Noble Foundation, Ardmore (OK) for about four years where he was actively involved in the basic plant biology research aimed at software development in computational biology, bioinformatics and genomics for biological discovery. The research in Kaundal Bioinformatics Laboratory (KBL) focuses on a range of topics: statistical pattern recognition, artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies in the area of agricultural biosecurity, metagenomics, regulatory mechanisms of gene expression, genome-wide host-pathogen interaction networks and genome annotation for functional studies. He is collaborating with OSU researchers, particularly on NGS data analysis, setting up automated pipelines and helping researchers analyzing the 'Big Data.' He has developed a range of bioinformatics tools that are useful within the real biological situations. His lab has expertise in developing distance-based and BLAST algorithms, Neural Networks, Support Vector Machine or Decision Tree classifiers to build patterns from genome regions; and ultimately incorporating them into searchable databases / visualization tools. More details at http://bioinfo.okstate.edu/.

Transfer of alien genes into crop plants from wild and distant plant genetic resources has invoked tremendous interest of crop scientists globally and several traits including resistance to diseases and insect-pests, tolerance to drought, salinity, temperature extremities and other abiotic stresses as well as genes for several quality traits have been transferred through vertical and horizontal gene transfer. Alien gene transfer, lately aided by molecular markers, molecular cytogenetics, genetic transformation and improved in vitro techniques has led to introgression of hundreds of genes of interest in crop species, thereby widening their genetic base and improving their genetic potential. While the gains through alien transfer are tremendous, these have also raised some doubts about the long-term economic and ecological impacts of such transfers in cultivated background. This book addresses all these issues and provides an insight into the methods, newer innovations, detection and achievements of alien gene transfer in crop plants. At the same time it also focuses on the issues of possible human and ecological impacts of alien gene transfers and describes the challenges and risks involved.

URL: https://library.okstate.edu/news/celebratingbooks/2014-honorees/rakesh-kaundal

Last Updated: 12 January 2022