Urooj Fatima
Urooj is the lead author on a recent Editor's Pick paper in the MPMI journal. You can read the original article in the MPMI Journal here.
Current Position: PhD student at National Institute of Plant Genome Research (NIPGR), New Delhi, India
Education: BS and MS in biotechnology from C.S.J.M University, Kanpur, India
Non-scientific Interest: Cooking, interior designing, writing and mentoring personality development programs for women’s empowerment
Brief-bio: I am a doctoral student at NIPGR, working under the supervision of Dr. Muthappa Senthil-Kumar. The research work published in MPMI includes the side project undertaken during my PhD. The aim of this project was to identify the nonhost resistance (NHR) contributing genes and the mechanisms operating in a nonhost, chickpea (Cicer arietinum) plant against Alternaria brassicae, which is a devastating fungal pathogen that causes considerable yield loss in Brassica crops. For my PhD thesis I am working to understand the defense strategies used by Arabidopsis thaliana for limiting the nutrient availability to invading bacterial pathogens. Specifically, I am studying the role of SWEET class of transporters. I enjoyed working on these two projects that entails entirely different pathosystem that helped me in comprehending the broad scientific concepts and learning new techniques.
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Urooj Fatima and Muthappa Senthil-Kumar; from the summary of the research Morpho-Pathological and Global Transcriptomic Analysis Reveals the Robust Nonhost Resistance Responses in Chickpea Interaction with Alternaria brassicae:
We have a few key points to share with the young researchers that we followed during manuscript preparation for submission in MPMI. A researcher must have a thorough understanding of their topic to carry out good research work. We have extensively studied the literature including recent and old research papers, review article and books related to my topic. Parallel to this manuscript, we wrote a review article about the perspective on the host and nonhost resistance mechanism against Alternaria blight. This allowed us to comprehend the topic of research better and to address the scientific problem systematically. Besides, it is important to note that the presentation of data in a well organized and comprehensive way is one of the primary factors to get a manuscript published in reputed journals. Apart from thorough experimentations, we critically worked on manuscript writing and data presentation in the form of quality figures. Further, data transparency is another important aspect in the research field. To provide more transparency, we have submitted the figure-wise raw data for the manuscript. It is advisable to submit the raw data files and make it available to reach the scientific audience to increase the credibility of your research work. By considering above mentioned points, we were able to publish our work in a highly reputed journal, MPMI. 
Read more about how the project got started and Urooj Fatima and Muthappa Senthil-Kumar’s (National Institute of Plant Genome Research, New Delhi) thoughts on the research here.
Read the original article in the MPMI Journal
