Aakash Chawade, Gothenburg University

Aakash Chawade, Department of Plant and Environmental Sciences, Gothenburg University, defended his doctoral dissertation entited ”Unravelling the complexity of cold acclimation in plants” on Friday 10 June 2011. Mr. Chawade has been working with Prof. Olof Olsson on projects related to understanding processes involved in the cold acclimation mechanism in Arabidopsis thaliana, oats and rice. One of the projects have focused on Cold stress in Oryza sativa – rice – in Nepal. Rice is a staple for a large part of the human population and more so in the Asia. It can be grown on the plains as well as on the hills. In-spite of possessing the functional CBF genes in the genome, rice is a chilling tolerant but cold sensitive plant. Some of the rice cultivars are however better chilling tolerant than the rest. Aakash’s goal in this project has been to study and characterize rice genes that could improve the freezing tolerance of rice. Hence, he has studied four different rice genes by over-expressing them in Arabidopsis thaliana.

The faculty opponent was Professor Tapio Palva, Department of Biological and Environmental Sciences, University of Helsinki, Finland. Read the full-text thesis (as a pdf-file)