I’ve pursued my bachelor’s and masters in genetic engineering from SRM University, Chennai. I was an Indian Academy of Science-Summer Research Fellow, in NIBMG, Kalyani where I studied the role of immune genes and their mutational landscape, in all cancer types. Bioinformatics tools like shell scripting, R, and Python was used to filter the TCGA data and scout out 9 genes that could be targeted for further study.

For my bachelor’s dissertation, I worked in the Neuropsychiatric and Epigenetics lab of Dr. Arvind Kumar, where I studied the epigenetic modulation of the reward pathway in mice. Pregnant mice were subjected to various stresses and their dams were tested for epigenetic changes like methylation and acetylation in the brain. Their behavioral changes noted in comparison to control dams born to non-stressed mothers. Behavioral tests like EPM, NORT, WMT, Rotarod, TST, and others were performed. Here I gained experience and expertise in mice handling and dissection, RNA extraction, cDNA synthesis, and qPCR procedures.

For my master’s thesis, under the supervision of Dr. Sitaram Harihar, at SRMIST, Chennai, my focus was to study the metastasis suppressor gene ITIH5 in pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma. Highly metastatic pancreatic cancer cell line MiaPaCa and Panic-1 were cultured and ITIH5 was pulled down using ChIP. The proteins interacting with ITIH5 were thereby isolated and then separated in-gel, which was further trypsin digested for mass-spectrometry. The proteins were then identified using a qTOF mass analyzer, to elucidate the interacting partners of the metastasis suppressor. Here I gained experience in cell culture, protein extraction, and trypsin digestion, as well as mass spectrometry.