Her work here focuses on providing bioinformatics leadership and service around plant genomics and other high-throughput omics approaches for plant breeding. She applies high-throughput sequencing technologies, genomic and metabolomic methods and bioinformatics resources to disentangle the genetic basis of complex agricultural traits and identify new genetic gains. Her research also assesses the role of genetic diversity in mediating adaptive capacity to climatic stress (abiotic and biotic) in crop plants.

She has over 15 years of experience in the bioinformatics field (particularly with omics approaches - transcriptomics, metabolomics, genomics, phylogenomics, pipeline development and imparting bioinformatics trainings). Niharika has worked exclusively in the Agricultural research sector handling crop datasets with positions at the University of Adelaide and the University of Delhi (India).

Her research in the past years has mainly focused on carrying out NGS data analysis (RNA-Seq, Sequence Capture, Amplicon sequencing, DNA Mate-pair Seq) for various research projects aimed at abiotic stress tolerance in crops like wheat, rice, canola and chickpeas. Here at DPIRD, her work frame mainly involves answering biological research questions by analysing NGS sequencing and metabolomics datasets using High Performance Computing (HPC) with novel algorithms and advanced statistical approaches.

Recent publications

Please refer to Google Scholar and/or ResearchGate page