Kaltum Ibrahim

Uppsala University / Plant Stress Biology

Advisor: Prof. Sven Eriksson

Kaltum Ibrahim characterises the transcriptional and chromatin-accessibility changes that enable sorghum to remember a previous drought stress episode and respond more effectively to a second water deficit — a phenomenon called stress memory that holds significant promise for breeding drought-resilient varieties for the Horn of Africa. At Uppsala University's Plant Biology department, supervised by Prof. Sven Eriksson and collaborating with a Somali-Swedish diaspora research network, she profiles RNA-seq, ATAC-seq, and whole-genome bisulphite sequencing simultaneously across 12 time-points spanning the priming stress, recovery, and recall drought phases. Multi-omics integration using a custom Python pipeline has pinpointed 23 transcription factors whose promoter chromatin remains constitutively accessible across the recovery period — candidate master regulators of drought memory that she is validating by CRISPR knockout in sorghum mesophyll protoplasts. Three candidates regulate dehydrin gene expression and show strong association with yield stability across 200 diverse sorghum accessions in publicly available GWAS datasets. Kaltum's FAO partnership for Sub-Saharan cereal breeding provides field phenotyping infrastructure across Ethiopia and Somalia, while her Plant Cell manuscript submission targets the premier plant science audience for the mechanistic findings.