Priya Ramakrishna
EPFL ENAC IIE LGB
GR C2 525 (Bâtiment GR)
Station 2
1015 Lausanne
Web site: Web site: https://lgb.epfl.ch
Fields of expertise
- Environmental stress
- Salinity
- Plant root biology
- Mineral nutrition
- Cryo-imaging
- Ion transport
Biography
Priya Ramakrishna is an Assistant Professor of Environmental Engineering and leads the Plant Adaptation Laboratory (PAL) at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Lausanne, CH. Her group aims to understand the fine-tuned mechanisms employed by plants to adapt to abiotic stress such as salinity.Dr. Ramakrishna was a researcher at the Laboratory of Biological Geochemistry at EPFL from 2022 - 2025 where she pioneered the first application of the newly developed CryoNanoSIMS ion imaging pipeline on plant tissues. The work provided novel insights into subcellular salinity stress coping strategies of plants and forms the core area of research in her lab in addition to mineral nutrition of plants. She hold a Bachelor`s degree in Biotech Engineering from India and Master`s and PhD in Plant Biology from the University of Nottingham, UK. She was awarded the prestigious Swiss National Science Foundation Starting Grant to lead an independent research group to explore the cellular adaptation strategies of plants in response to salinity stress.
Publications
Selected publications
| Priya Ramakrishna, Francisco M. Gámez-Arjona, Etienne Bellani, Cristina Martin-Olmos, Stéphane Escrig, Damien De Bellis, Anna De Luca, José M. Pardo, Francisco J. Quintero, Christel Genoud, Clara Sánchez-Rodriguez, Niko Geldner & Anders Meibom Increasing soil salinity causes significant crop losses globally; therefore, understanding plant responses to salt (sodium) stress is of high importance. Plants avoid sodium toxicity through subcellular compartmentation by intricate processes involving a high level of elemental interdependence. Here we used the newly developed cryo nanoscale secondary ion mass spectrometry ion microprobe1, which allows high-resolution elemental imaging of cryo-preserved samples and reveals the subcellular distributions of key macronutrients and micronutrients in root meristem cells of Arabidopsis and rice. We found an unexpected, concentration-dependent change in sodium distribution, switching from sodium accumulation in the cell walls at low external sodium concentrations to vacuolar accumulation at stressful concentrations. We conclude that, in root meristems, a key function of the NHX family sodium/proton antiporter SALT OVERLY SENSITIVE 1 (also known as Na /H exchanger 7; SOS1/NHX7) is to sequester sodium into vacuoles, rather than extrusion of sodium into the extracellular space. |
Elemental cryo-imaging reveals SOS1-dependent vacuolar sodium accumulation |