About the Authors

Karnika Thakur

Contributed equally to this work with: Karnika Thakur, Vandna Chawla

Affiliations Biotechnology Division, CSIR-Institute of Himalayan Bioresource Technology (Council of Scientific and Industrial Research), Palampur, Himachal Pradesh, India, Department of Biotechnology, Panjab University, Chandigarh, India

Vandna Chawla

Contributed equally to this work with: Karnika Thakur, Vandna Chawla

Affiliation Studio of Computational Biology & Bioinformatics, CSIR-Institute of Himalayan Bioresource Technology (Council of Scientific and Industrial Research), Palampur, Himachal Pradesh, India

Shammi Bhatti

Affiliation Biotechnology Division, CSIR-Institute of Himalayan Bioresource Technology (Council of Scientific and Industrial Research), Palampur, Himachal Pradesh, India

Mohit Kumar Swarnkar

Affiliation Biotechnology Division, CSIR-Institute of Himalayan Bioresource Technology (Council of Scientific and Industrial Research), Palampur, Himachal Pradesh, India

Jagdeep Kaur

Affiliation Department of Biotechnology, Panjab University, Chandigarh, India

Ravi Shankar

ravish@ihbt.res.in (RS); jmsgopal@ihbt.res.in (GJ)

Affiliation Studio of Computational Biology & Bioinformatics, CSIR-Institute of Himalayan Bioresource Technology (Council of Scientific and Industrial Research), Palampur, Himachal Pradesh, India

Gopaljee Jha

ravish@ihbt.res.in (RS); jmsgopal@ihbt.res.in (GJ)

Affiliation Biotechnology Division, CSIR-Institute of Himalayan Bioresource Technology (Council of Scientific and Industrial Research), Palampur, Himachal Pradesh, India

Competing Interests

The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Author Contributions

Provided intellectual input in compilation of this manuscript: JK. Supervised the computational part of this study: RS. Carried out wet lab experiments associated with work: KT. Prepared cDNA libraries for Illumina sequencing: KT. Significantly contributed in acquisition and interpretation of data: KT. Performed reads generation, quality filtering, assembling, annotations, phylogenomics and associated computational study in this work: VC. Performed bioassays: SB. Assisted in cDNA library preparation for Illumina sequencing: SB. Performed Illumina sequencing run: MKS. Assisted in Illumina sample preparation work flow: MKS. Conceived and designed the experiments: GJ. Analyzed the data: KT VC GJ RS. Contributed reagents/materials/analysis tools: GJ. Wrote the paper: KT VC GJ.