Renu Kumari

Research scholar in the Department of Biochemistry, School of Life Sciences, Central University of Rajasthan (PhD, 2021–2026). Thesis: Studies on Drought Stress and its Mitigation in Cicer arietinum L., covering the molecular, physiological and biochemical responses of chickpea to drought and ways to reduce its impact.

Research interests: plant genetic engineering and genome editing, plant tissue culture and transformation, genome-wide gene-family analysis, molecular biology and plant–microbe interaction. Doctoral work includes genome-wide characterisation of the peroxiredoxin (PRX) gene family in chickpea and TLDc-domain genes in rice, overexpression and CRISPR-Cas editing constructs introduced into chickpea and Arabidopsis with screening of T0 and T1 plants, and the combined use of zinc oxide nanoparticles and plant growth-promoting rhizobacteria (PGPR) to improve drought tolerance.

Publications: two research papers (2025) in the Journal of Plant Growth Regulation and Computational Biology and Chemistry, one Springer book chapter (2025), and two further manuscripts (one accepted in the Journal of Plant Growth Regulation, one under communication).

Presentations: posters at ICPP 2025 (Tamil Nadu Agricultural University, Coimbatore), SPARC-2026 and a 2024 national conference on biochemical sciences (both at Central University of Rajasthan), and an oral presentation during the JST Sakura Science exchange programme at the University of Tokyo (November 2024).

Methods: Agrobacterium-mediated transformation and tissue culture (chickpea, rice, Arabidopsis, Nicotiana), gateway and conventional cloning, qRT-PCR and PCR screening, genomic DNA isolation, bioinformatic gene and protein function prediction, molecular docking, and physiological, biochemical and histological analysis.