University of Manitoba researcher Shruti Kashyap is uncovering how water stress influences disease resistance — and what it could mean for future canola varieties. Meet the third in our 7 Future Builders of Plant Breeding.
Some researchers spend years finding the question they want to answer. Shruti Kashyap brought hers with her.
After earning undergraduate and master’s degrees in genetics and plant breeding in India, she came to the University of Manitoba to pursue a PhD focused on one of Canada’s biggest emerging challenges: understanding how drought and water stress influence disease resistance in canola.
It’s research that sits squarely at the intersection of climate change, plant pathology and crop improvement — a place where tomorrow’s breeding breakthroughs are increasingly likely to happen.
Shruti’s doctoral research examines how different soil moisture conditions affect Verticillium stripe, a disease becoming more important in Canadian canola production. Rather than studying the pathogen in isolation, she’s investigating the three-way relationship between the plant, the disease and the environment.
Her goal is simple in concept but complex in execution: help breeders better evaluate disease resistance under the kinds of unpredictable environmental conditions farmers increasingly face.
The project blends physiology, molecular biology, genetics and anatomy, requiring everything from transcriptomics and DNA sequencing to microscopy and advanced statistical analysis.
She has authored or co-authored 10 publications, book chapters and conference papers, with additional manuscripts underway. Her research spans maize genetics, root architecture, genomics and crop improvement before she arrived in Canada to focus on canola.
She’s proficient in an unusually broad range of laboratory techniques, from sequencing and transcriptomics to quantitative PCR, microscopy, bioinformatics and statistical genetics.
What distinguishes Shruti isn’t simply technical ability. Her résumé reads less like that of a graduate student and more like someone already building a scientific career.
Shruti is the third in our series of 7 Future Builders of Plant Breeding. Read about Luke Dojack and Yue Yu!
