Browsing by Author "Vishal Kumar Jha"

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Bryophytes as Modern Model Plants: An Overview of Their Development, Contributions, and Future Prospects
(Springer, 2023) Sandhya Yadav; Suvajit Basu; Akanksha Srivastava; Subhankar Biswas; Raju Mondal; Vishal Kumar Jha; Sushil Kumar Singh; Yogesh Mishra
Model organisms are commonly employed in research as convenient tools for studying diverse biological processes. Plant research relied on several non-model plants until the Arabidopsis thaliana was developed as powerful model for identifying genes and determining their functions. To study the genetics of unique processes in different species, few other model photosynthetic organisms have recently been established, including Synechocystis sp. PCC 6803, Anabaena sp. PCC 7120, Chlamydomonas reinhardatii, Oryza sativa, Zea mays, Triticum dicoccoides, Populus trichocarpa, and Picea abies. However, when it comes to answering different biological problems, each of the current model plants has its own set of advantages and disadvantages, and many questions about land plant adaptation strategies at the level of morpho-physiology, development, and stress mitigation could not be adequately answered using these models. Furthermore, the high occurrence of embryo lethal mutations rendered studying the molecular basis of 3-dimensional (3-D) growth and gametogenesis unfeasible. Since bryophytes have a low cellular complexity and a dominant haploid gametophytic phase, they could be useful models not only for avoiding the aforementioned drawbacks, but also for functional genomics research and understanding the chronology of land plant evolution. These distinguishing characteristics and the advancement of sequencing technology have led to the development of some bryophytes as modern model plants, including Physcomitrium patens, Marchantia polymorpha, Anthoceros agrestis. Here, we review at how bryophytes became model plants, and how they have been able to answer crucial plant biology-related concerns like stress tolerance and evolutionary developmental (evo-devo) biology that other model plants have not been able to. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature.
Two Evolutionary Diverged Liverworts that Shared the Same Habitats Developed a Few Distinct Seasonal Adaptive Strategies: Insights from a Transcriptomic Approach
(Springer, 2025) Suvajit Basu; Sandhya Yadav; Vishal Kumar Jha; Subhankar Biswas; Akanksha Srivastava; Kritika Tripathi; Raju Mondal; Neha Chaurasia; Sushil Kumar Singh; Yogesh Mishra
Since liverworts are among the earliest land plants to undergo seasonal fluctuations, they hold the secret to the molecular mechanism behind seasonal adaptation. Depending on their evolutionary histories, different liverwort species may have relatively distinct adaptive mechanisms. We therefore, performed a seasonal transcriptome analysis of two Indian liverworts, Dumortiera hirsuta and Plagiochasma appendiculatum, during their four different growing seasons (pre-monsoon, monsoon, post-monsoon, and fruiting season). These two species diverged at different points in their evolutionary history but coexist in the same habitat. Phylogenetic trees and evolutionary timescale analyses showed that D. hirsuta is primitive than P. appendiculatum. The RNA-seq analysis showed that D. hirsuta primarily modifies its transcriptome by differentially regulating growth, metabolism, and stress-responsive genes and related TFs in the post-monsoon but mainly induces specific stress-responsive genes in the fruiting season. This is likely to develop reproductive organs in the post-monsoon season and to strategically adapt to the harsh environmental conditions of both seasons by conserving energy during the fruiting season. Conversely, P. appendiculatum exhibited significant transcriptome variability by modulating the expression of genes with similar functions during both the fruiting and post-monsoon seasons, albeit to a lesser degree than D. hirsuta. This suggests that P. appendiculatum strategically modulated its necessary gene expression levels over an extended period of time while taking energy conservation into consideration in order to survive the harsh conditions of both seasons. This study offers the first comprehensive view of seasonal adaptive strategies employed by two evolutionary diverged liverworts that coexist in the same habitat. © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2025.