Dr. Thanvi Srikant

Plants, being sessile organisms, find a multitude of ways to adapt to changing environments. I am fascinated by how natural populations of the same species can exhibit diverse phenotypes driven by genomic and epigenomic variation.

I completed my PhD in 2021 at the Max Planck Institute for Biology in Tübingen, studying natural accessions of the mustard plant Arabidopsis thaliana. For my thesis, I investigated the interplay between DNA methylation, chromatin architecture and gene expression in a large collection of epigenetic mutants and wild-types.

In January 2022, I began my postdoctoral research at the Bomblies lab to study Arabidopsis arenosa, a plant species which naturally occurs in both diploid and autotetraploid forms across many ecologically distinct populations. Genome scans have shown that several genes are under selection in A. arenosa tetraploids, including genes associated with epigenome stability. Additionally, it is known that tetraploids have expanded nuclear volume and highly compacted chromosomes.

I aim to systematically understand whether chromatin architecture can influence the onset and stability of polyploidization. This will be achieved using whole-genome sequencing approaches to evaluate chromatin accessibility in somatic and meiotic tissues of diploid, neo-tetraploid and autotetraploid A. arenosa individuals across different populations. Furthermore, I will be investigating whether regions of differential chromatin accessibility can facilitate thermotolerance in populations adapted to warmer temperature regimes. Ultimately, this can help uncover how epigenomic changes can enable genome stability under various climatic conditions.