Divergence in Patterns of Leaf Growth Polarity Is Associated with the Expression Divergence of miR396

Author Profile

Mainak Das Gupta

Current Position: Post-doctoral fellow, Department of Comparative Development and Genetics (Miltos Tsiantis Group), Max Planck Institute for Plant Breeding Research, Cologne, Germany.

Education: PhD in Biology, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, India.

Non-scientific Interests: Indian classical music and classical dance; traveling; socializing with friends and partying. My favorite musician is Ustad Vilayat Khan, a great Sitar maestro from India, and my favorite dancers are Bijayini Satpathy and Surupa Sen, the two great Odissi dancers from India.

I joined the lab of Dr. Utpal Nath (Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, India) in 2007 as a PhD student after obtaining my Master's Degree in Zoology (Varanasi, India). I started my PhD with studying the structure and function of TCP4, a plant specific transcription factor in Arabidopsis. However, in my free time, I would go around our lush green campus putting spots over growing leaves with a marker pen and follow the growth patterns out of mere curiosity. That is when I noticed that most leaves do not grow in the way the leaves of most model plants do. The variations in growth patterns became more and more evident as I kept including an increasing number of species to the study. It was very exciting to discover the variations in growth patterns; but, at the same time, it was also a challenge to formalize the findings and present it to the greater scientific community as a tangible story. It was while comparing the patterns of leaf growth that I got deeply interested in the field of evolutionary developmental biology. Therefore, after completing my PhD, I moved to Singapore to study evo-devo with Antonia Monteiro using butterflies as the model organisms. Critical comments from Dr. Monteiro have been really helpful to our manuscript. I am currently studying the evolution of leaf shape using several crucifer species in the lab of Miltos Tsiantis in Germany.