Sureshkumar works in the School of Biological Sciences at Monash University as a Professor. 

Brief CV

2021 - present: Professor, Monash University

2011 - 2021: Associate Professor  School of Biological Sciences, Monash University.

2011-2015: ARC Future Fellow / Larkins Fellow, Monash University.

2011: Senior Lecturer/ARC Future Fellow, School of Biological Sciences, University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia

2007-2010: Lecturer, School of Biological Sciences, University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia

2002-2007: EMBO Postdoctoral Fellow, Max-Planck Institute for Developmental Biology, Tuebingen, Germany, Advisor: Prof. Detlef Weigel

2002: University of Zurich, Switzrland, Advisor: Prof. Kay Schneitz

Key Research Questions

My research group has an interest to understand genaralisable principles in biology using diverse systems. We have three main areas of research that are currently pursued in our group.

Molecular Basis of Thermomorphogenesis

First one relates to the field of "thermomorphogenesis" (Casal and Balasubramanian, Ann Rev of Plant Biol, 2019), which relates to the morphological changes that are seen in response to temperature. We use the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana to address some of the fundamental quesitons related to how plants sense and respond to changes in temperature. At present considerable effort is on to understand the role of epigenetic regulation conferring thermal response in plants. 

Mechanisms of Epigenetic gene silencing caused by expanded repeats

Second area of work addresses how trinculeotide repeat expansions lead to epigenetic silencing in biological systems. Trinculeotide repeat expansions, particularly in noncoding regions are massive and can cause epigenetic silencing resulting in diseases such as Friedreich ataxia. We discovered a repeat expansion in Arabidopsis (Sureshkumar et al, Science, 2009) and established that as a model to study fundamental aspects of epigenetic silencing caused by expanded repeats (Eimer et al, Cell, 2018; Sureshkumar et al, Nature Plants, 2024). At present, we are exploring the relevance of these findings using Friedreich ataxia cell lines. 

Deciphering the splicing code in eukaryotes

The third part of our research addresses a key question of how splicing decisions are made in eukaryotes. We stumbled on this question while studying how environmental sensing involves alternative splicing in plants (Sureshkumar et al, Nature Plants, 2016). This led us to identify some computational issues in the analysis of alternative splicing. We developed a tool to quantify splicing at the level of individual splice sites (Dent et al, NAR-Genomics and Bioinformatics, 2021) and used this measure as a quantitative phenotype to unravel patterns in splice-site choice (Dent et al, BioRxives, 2024). We are currently using these patterns to link genetic variation and splice-site choice across diverse eukaryotic organisms with implications ranging from agriculture to personalised medicine.