Research Interest:

 “Epigenetic regulation” during plant response to environmental or development clues

Plants constantly modify their physiological processes in response to developmental and environmental cues. The  reprogramming of cell differentiation in response to stimuli requires alteration of gene expressions, posttranscriptional and/or translational modifications of factors. Regulation of gene expression needs to occur in the context of chromatin. Change in chromatin landscape is therefore the rate-limiting step for such DNA-dependent processes. In eukaryotes, accessibility of

 DNA to transcription machinery is affected by the degree of DNA packaging into chromatin structure. The central question therefore is to understand how gene expression is precisely regulated to give rise to the correct response during a process. Epigenetic effects such as DNA methylation or histone modification have been increasingly shown to play a critical role in global gene regulation. The common outcome of epigenetic regulation is the modification of the local chromatin structure which leads to the change in accessibility of DNA sequence to the regulatory factors.

Plant cells after perceiving the stress signals through various sensors, transduce the signal by various pathways through many second messengers, plant hormones, signal transducers and transcriptional regulators function. This signal ultimately leads to regulation of many stress-inducible gene products.  Some stress-inducible genes encode functional proteins that are directly involved in stress tolerance such as molecular chaperons, LEA proteins, metabolic enzymes etc. Other stress-inducible genes encode regulatory proteins, such as signal transducers, transcription factors etc form positive and negative feedback loops to regulate stress responses. As a whole it is clear that spatio-temporal expression of these stress-inducible genes is the key for the immediate stress response and ultimately tolerance to the plant.  Inductions of these stress-inducible genes are under the tight transcription regulation which is guided by post-transcriptional and post-translational modifications and epigenetic regulation.

Current activities:

1. Study the role of ARID/HMGs a non-histone protein, in modulating chromatin accessibility in plants
2. Investigating the epigenetic changes when plants are subjected to abiotic stress signal.

Selected publication:

          Research articles

• Subho Chaudhuri, Anindita Seal & Maitrayee DasGupta (1999). Autophosphorylation Dependent Activation of a Calcium Dependent Protein Kinase from Arachis hypogea Plant. Plant Physiology 120: 859-866

• Seal, A., Hazra A., Nag, R., Chaudhuri, S. and DasGupta, M (2001). Exogenous auxin depletion renders Arachis hypogea suspension culture sensitive to water loss without affecting cell growth. Plant Cell Reports. 20(6): 567 – 573

• Asita Chatterjee, Yaya cui, Shubho Chaudhuri and Arun Chatterjee (2002) Identification of regulators of hrp/hop genes of Erwinia carotovora ssp. carotovora and characterization of HrpL_Ecc(sigma L_Ecc), an alternative sigma factor.  Molecular Plant Pathology 3(5), 359-370.

• Tianbao Yang, Shubho Chaudhuri, Lihua Yang, Yanping Chen, and   B. W. Poovaiah. (2004). Calcium/calmodulin up-regulates a cytoplasmic receptor-like kinase in plants. J. Biol. Chem., 279: 42552-42559

• Raichaudhuri A, Bhattacharyya R, Chaudhuri S, Chakrabarti P, Dasgupta M. (2006) Domain analysis of a groundnut calcium-dependent protein kinase: nuclear localization sequence in the junction domain is coupled with nonconsensus calcium binding domains. J. Biol. Chem., 281:10399-409

• Cynthia Gleason, Shubho Chaudhuri, Tianbao Yang , Alfonso Munoz-Gutierrez , B. W.  Poovaiah, GIles Oldroyd. (2006) Legume nodulation independent of rhizobia is induced by a modified calcium/calmodulin activated kinase lacking autoinhibition. Nature 441: 1149–1152

• Shubho Chaudhuri, John J. Wyrick, and Michael J. Smerdon. (2009) Histone H3 Lys79 Methylation is Required for Efficient Nucleotide Excision Repair in a Silenced Locus of Saccharomyces cerevisiae. Nucleic acids research 37(5): 1690-1700

• Tianbao Yang, Shubho Chaudhuri, Lihua Yang, Liqun Du and B.W. Poovaiah (2010). Calcium/calmodulin-regulated Receptor-like Kinase is a positive regulator of Cold tolerance in Plants.  J. Biol. Chem 285(10):7119-26.

Book Chapters:

• Maitrayee DasGupta and Subho Chaudhuri (2001). CDPKS in plant signaling networks- Progress in research on Groundnut CDPK.  In “Signal transduction in plants” (S.K. Sopory; R. Oelmuller and S. C. Maheshwari, Eds.). Kluwer academic Press, Page 145-156.

Ongoing Research Project:

• Investigating the role of ARID/HMG - a novel high mobility group protein in modulation of chromatin structure in plants. CSIR Project (PI: Dr. Shubho Chaudhuri)

• Generation of salt-tolerant rice plants: A translational approach. DBT project. (Co-ordinator: Prof. A. N.Lahiri Majumder, Co-Investigator: Dr. Shubho Chaudhuri)

Present students:

Ms. Adrita Roy (CSIR fellow)		Mr. Dipan Roy (CSIR fellow)		Mr. Amit Paul (DBT project fellow)