Avatar for Harkamal Walia

Harkamal Walia

Professor, Daugherty Water for Food Global Institute Faculty Fellow, Heuermann Chair of Agronomy Agronomy & Horticulture University of Nebraska-Lincoln

Contact

Address
KEIM 326
Lincoln NE 68583-0915
Phone
402-472-1162 On-campus 2-1162
Email
hwalia2@unl.edu
Website

Area of Expertise: Plant Breeding and Genetics
Area of Focus: Crop Abiotic Stress Tolerance, Phenomics and Functional Genomics

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Education

B.S., Plant Breeding and Genetics, Punjab Agricultural University, India, 2000
Ph.D., Plant Biology, University of California, Riverside, 2005
 

Research Interests

Unfavorable environmental conditions such as drought, high and low temperature stress, salinity, and flooding result in heavy crop yield losses in the U.S. and worldwide. These stressful conditions are increasingly associated with a shift in agriculture to marginal lands. My research interest is in understanding how plants adapt to these environmental stresses. I am particularly interested in the physiological and molecular characterization of crop responses to drought, heat and salt stress. Plant responses to stress depend on the developmental stage at which the stressful conditions arise.

Research in the lab focuses on stress tolerance during developmental stages that are particularly sensitive to abiotic stresses resulting in yield and biomass losses. We are using genomics, biochemical, computational and physiological approaches to elucidate the mechanisms involved in abiotic stress tolerance in cereals such as wheat, maize, and rice among others. The overall research goal is to discover genes and genetic variants that can be used to improve crop performance in sub-optimal growing conditions.

Major Project Activities

  • Functional characterization of heat-regulated genes during reproductive development.
  • Genetic and physiological characterization of roots in wheat during drought stress.
  • Comparative transcriptome analyses of cereals crops in response to a suite of abiotic stresses.
  • Elucidating the gene networks regulating early seed development and seed size in cereals.

Publications

Selected Publications from Google Scholar

  • Sandhu J, Irvin L, Chandaran AK, Oguro S, Paul P, Dhatt B, Hussain W, Cunningham SS, Quinones CO, Lorence A, Adviento-Borbe MA, Staswick P, Morota G, Walia H. Natural variation in LONELY GUY-Like 1 regulates rice grain weight under warmer night conditions. Plant Physiology. 2024. 
  • Dharni JS, Dhatt BK, Paul P, Gao T, Awada T, Bacher H, Peleg Z, Staswick P, Hupp J, Yu H, Walia H. A non-destructive approach for measuring rice panicle-level photosynthetic responses using 3D-image reconstruction. 2022, Plant Methods
  • Yu H, Du Q, Campbell M, Yu B, Walia H, Zhang C. Genome-wide discovery of natural variation in pre-mRNA splicing and prioritizing causal alternative splicing to salt stress response in rice. 2021, New Phytologist
  • Dhatt BK, Paul P, Sandhu J, Hussain W, Larissa I, Zhu F, Adviento-Borbe M, Lorence A, Staswick P, Yu H, Morota G, Walia H. Allelic Variation in Rice Fertilization Independent Endosperm 1 Contributes to Grain Width Under High Night Temperature Stress. 2021, New Phytologist
  • Placido DF, Sandhu J, Sato SJ, Nersesian N, Quach T, Clemente TE, Staswick P, Walia H. The Lateral Root Density gene regulates root growth during water stress in wheat. 2020, Plant Biotechnology Journal