Insight into virus disease challenges in food legumes in Genomic era

Abstract

With more than 35 years of research experience on characterization, diagnosis, comparative and functional genomics of whitefly transmitted geminiviruses infecting grain legumes, cotton and tomato, Dr V.G. Malathi has developed and deposited more than 100 full length genomic clones of 20 begamovirus, one mastrevirus deposited with the Clone Bank at Advanced Centre for Plant Virology, IARI, New Delhi, developed Partial tandem dimeric infectious constructs of 14 begamovirus and complete tandem repeat construct of one mastrevirus deposited with Clone Bank at Advanced centre for Plant Virology, IARI, and several RNA I constructs targeting the geminivirus rep gene, coat protein and intergenic regions. She has to her credit more than 200 NCBI sequence submissions and more than a hundred publications. She was nominated as a Member in the Study Group on Geminiviruses in the International Committee on the taxonomy of viruses (2010-2015). She is also recipient of several awards like ICAR Best women scientist award 2010 and Khwarizmi International Award 2007, Islamic Republic of Iran to name a few.