Kiran Mysore

BIO

I received my Bachelor's degree in Agriculture at the University of Agricultural Sciences, Bangalore (India), Master's degree in Horticulture at Clemson University and Ph.D. in Genetics at Purdue University. I did my postdoctoral training in plant genomics at the Boyce Thompson Institute for Plant Research, Cornell University with Dr. Greg Martin. After my postdoctoral training, I joined Noble Research Institute as an Assistant Professor in 2002 and rose up to the rank of Full Professor. Later I served as the head of Plant, Microbe and Soil Section at the Noble Research Institute for three years before joining Oklahoma State University as a Research Professor in 2021. My research interests center on molecular plant-microbe interactions, abiotic stress tolerance, and plant genetic resource development. I have authored over 250 peer-reviewed manuscripts in international journals. I am an elected fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). I am the recipient of Fulbright-Nehru Academic & Professional Excellence Award and Ruth Allen award from the American Phytopathological Society (APS). I serve on the editorial boards of peer reviewed journals, BMC Plant Biology, Bioenergy Research, PeerJ and Grassland Research.

Research Interests:

Many projects in my lab focus on Molecular-Plant Microbe Interactions. One of the main projects in this area is to understand the phenomenon of nonhost disease resistance. Nonhost resistance is the most common form of disease resistance exhibited by plants against the majority of potentially pathogenic microorganisms. Nonhost resistance has been a topic of interest for many plant pathology researchers for several years. Despite tremendous progress in molecular plant pathology, nonhost resistance is still poorly understood in contrast with classical gene-for-gene resistance. Nicotiana benthamiana and Medicago truncatula are being used as model plants to understand nonhost resistance mechanisms. Virus-induced gene silencing (VIGS) based fast-forward genetics in N. benthamiana is being used to identify plant genes that play a role in nonhost resistance against both bacterial and fungal pathogens. Transposon insertion mutants of M. truncatula are also being used to screen for mutants that compromise nonhost resistance against Asian soybean rust. This study will help better understand how plants defend against pathogens and to genetically engineer crop plants for broad resistance. Interestingly, some of the genes identified to play a role in nonhost disease resistance also plays a role in abiotic stresses such as drought and heat. Some projects in my lab also focus on abiotic stress tolerance in a hope to engineer multi-stress tolerant plants.
Another project in my lab focuses on understanding Agrobacterium-mediated plant transformation. Genetic transformation of plant cells by Agrobacterium tumefaciens represents a unique case of trans-kingdom sex requiring the involvement of both bacterial virulence proteins and plant-encoded proteins. We are identifying plant genes that play a role in Agrobacterium-mediated plant transformation that can help increase the transformation efficiency of transformation-recalcitrant crops like soybean and wheat and to prevent crown gall disease in horticultural crops. To increase plant transformation efficiency in recalcitrant crop varieties, we have engineered an Agrobacterium strain that can express a Type III secretion system to deliver proteins that can enhance transformation.
My lab has developed a large collection of transposon insertion mutants in M. truncatula using a tobacco retrotransposon, Tnt1, which is a viable and attractive option to introduce multiple independent insertions per plant for saturation mutagenesis. More than 20,000 transposon tagged M. truncatula lines encompassing more than one million insertions have already been developed and is available to the scientific community. A flanking sequence tag (FST) database with more than 400,000 FSTs has been created and can be used for BLAST searches (https://medicago-mutant.dasnr.okstate.edu/mutant/blast/blast.php) to identify M. truncatula mutant(s) in the gene of interest.