Welcome to Kenchanmane Raju Lab

Kenchanmane-Raju lab in the Department of Botany and Plant Sciences at the University of California Riverside focuses on understanding cell-type specific responses to environmental challenges in crops and their wild relatives. Using state-of-the-art single-cell sequencing techniques for transcriptomes and chromatin accessibility, we plan to unravel the mysteries of crop resilience through comparative studies.

We use maize and its stress-adapted wild relatives to understand how genome and gene duplication allow cell-type-specific responses to environmental cues. Using single-nuclei transcriptomes, methylomes, and chromatin accessibility, we hope to decipher the regulation of duplicate gene evolution. This will enable us to identify important climate resilience genes in crops such as maize and sorghum.

We are also interested in understanding the evolution of environment-responsive genes at the population level. We will use Arabidopsis, maize, and other model plants for this.