Outreach to highschool students
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Talked about synthetic biology and the iGEM competition to highschool students in Vidya Mandir school, Chennai, India Read more
Posts by Collection
engagement
iGEM India BioSummit
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Moderated the discussion on Health & Medical Data Privacy built around the sustainable development goals Industry, Innovation, and Infra (Goal 9), Good health and Well Being (Goal 3) at the iGEM India BIOSUMMIT 2020 Read more
Decolonizing North-South Research Collaboration Workshop
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Participated in a workshop exploring the challenges and opportunities in North-South research collaboration. During the discussions we identify the barriers to equitable research collaboration and develop strategies to overcome them. I contributed to discussions on power dynamics, knowledge production, and capacity building in research partnerships. Read more
Contribution to the scientific community
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Overview of contributions to the scientific community in the form of peer review, committee participation, and contribution to the develpment of community standards. Read more
research
Apis species comparison
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Honeybees serve as great model for studying gut microbiota evolution in the context of host ecology and evolution given their well-documented ecology and evolutionary history. Unlike the more diverse microbiomes of humans, primates, and mice, honeybees offer a more tractable system for understanding how gut microbiota are distributed and have evolved. This research is crucial for understanding how symbiotic interactions change and evolve across species but has been hindered by the lack of high-resolution genomic data. Read more
Gut Microbiome in Chronic Pancreatitis
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- As a Master’s student ready to begin my thesis I was motivated to continue working on a project that would utilize a cutting-edge technology to study the gut microbiome which I was very excited about.
- This excitement being contagious, I managed to convince my thesis supervisor to invest in a Nanopore sequencer for the lab.
- I used this opportunity to optimize protocls and setup the Nanopore sequencer in the lab and developed my bioinformatic skills starting with setting up a Linux workstation for the lab and implementing a bioinformatic pipeline for metagenomics analysis.
- I developed an end-to-end sampling and sequencing pipeline for metagenomics analysis of fecal samples using Nanopore sequencing in collaboration with a nearby hospital.
- In collaboration with a gastroenterologist we analyzed the human gut microbiome in chronic pancreatitis patients and compared them with healthy samples to identify disease-related changes in the gut microbiome.
Gut Metaproteomics
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- As a undergraduate student, I was excited to work on a project that would utilize cutting-edge technology to study the gut microbiome.
- I surveyed and tested various approaches for sample preparation and metaproteomic analysis of fecal samples using LC-MS/MS.
- Successfully detected proteins of microbiome origin but concluded that higher detection power eg. using a nano-LC MS/MS would be needed for fecal metaproteomics.
iGEM Project - Cellfiefuge
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- The iGEM (International Genetically Engineered Machines) competition is an annual, worldwide synthetic biology event that brings together students from diverse backgrounds to design and build genetically engineered systems using standard biological parts. In 2016, I co-initiated the first iGEM team at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bengaluru, India.
- Our iGEM project aimed to cut infrastructure requirements for biomanufacturing initiatives by engineering bacteria that can autoinduce protein overexpression and autoaggregate when production is complete, replacing the need for centrifugation of large cultures.
- More in our poster summarizing the project: iGEM Project Poster
- An article summarizing our experience as the first team from the institute and how our efforts paved the way to future teams that have since won awards and special mentions for their work can be found here
Priority Effects in the honeybee gut
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Through this study we aim to understand how bacterial strains in the gut microbiome interact with each other. Gut microbial communities often differ at the strain level even among closely related individuals, but the ecological mechanisms driving this variation remain poorly understood. One potential driver is priority effects, differences in the timing and order of microbial colonization, which can lead to the assembly of distinct communities, even under similar environmental conditions. Priority effects may specifically play an important role in shaping microbial communities at the strain level, given that strains of the same species typically occupy similar ecological niches. To test this, we examined gut microbiota assembly in honeybees, in which age-matched nestmates are known to host similar microbial communities at the species level but vary in strain composition. We sequentially colonized microbiota-depleted honeybees with two distinct microbial communities, each composed of the same twelve species but different strains. We found that firstcomer strains consistently dominated the resulting communities, though the strength of these priority effects varied among closely related strains and species. Dropping out individual strains from the firstcomer community only partially improved the colonization success of latecomer conspecifics, suggesting that priority effects also act across species boundaries. Our results underscore the importance of priority effects for gut microbial community assembly at the strain level and in shaping the specialized gut microbiota of bees. Read more
Gut microbiome of wild and managed honeybees
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Little is known about the gut microbiome of wild honeybees. Taking advantage of a large collection of wild honeybees of various subspecies from across Africa, painstakingly put together by our collaborators, we are investigating the differences in the gut microbiome of wild and managed honeybees. We are using shotgun metagenomics to resolve strain-level differences in the gut bacterial community and are currently analyzing the data to identify bacterial strains and species that are found in wild and managed honeybees and investigating their distribution across colonies of different subspecies. Read more