Our planet Earth is home to estimated 350,000 plant species. There is enormous chemical diversity in these plant species, which mainly comes from specialized metabolites selected throughout the course of evolution. Plant specialized metabolism has been harnessed for various purposes including food/agriculture, traditional and modern medicine out of many others. We are interested in investigating diverse natives of Florida and also other species for plant specialized metabolites of agricultural and pharmaceutical value in order to understand the chemical diversity and decipher the molecular mechanisms underlying these useful compounds by employing multi-disciplinary approaches such as mass spectrometry, RNA-seq, gene discovery, functional genomics including gene-editing approaches.
Dr. Satya Swathi Nadakuduti is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Environmental Horticulture at the University of Florida. Dr. Nadakuduti received her Ph.D. in Plant Breeding, Genetics and Biotechnology from Michigan State University. Her lab is interested in studying plants specialized metabolism in order to understand the chemical diversity, identify compounds that have pharmaceutical value, their potential for health benefits and applications in agriculture. Her research program integrates multi-disciplinary approaches such as biochemistry, genomics, gene discovery and functional characterization to understand the molecular mechanisms underlying the biosynthesis of these compounds. Her group is also interested in targeted genome modifications using gene-editing technology such as CRISPR/Cas9 for agriculture crop improvement, as functional genomics tool and to understand genome-wide off-target affects caused by gene-editing reagents. Her group is interested in micropropagation and implementing gene-editing in medicinally relevant plant species.
