Research Summary

Bacterial Pan-Genome Evolution

Evolutionary Biology unravels important findings that strike the attention of scientists from all disciplines, as well as, the public in general. By focusing on microbial genome evolution, the emphasis of my research will be on the evolutionary history of existing pathogenic and non-pathogenic microbes whose genomes are completely sequenced. Currently, microbiologists accept the fact that genome evolution is heavily influenced by lateral gene transfer (LGT or HGT), an important evolutionary process that allows the spread of innovations between closely and distantly related organisms. With a major focus on LGTs, my research focus is on better understanding of the overall process of microbial genome evolution and origin, adaptation, transmission and evolution of pathogenicity and antibiotic resistance among microbes in a wide variety of environments.I will present and employ a fundamentally new and far more suitable mathematical and graphical vehicle for the study of microbial genome evolution that captures the dynamics of gene distributions and evolution across genomes.

Microbial Diversity, Ecology and Evolution

Traditionally the study of microbes has limited on single species in pure culture, so understanding complex communities logs behind understanding their individualbehavior. Metagenomic approaches can solve this problem to a certain extent, butcomplementation of metagenomics data with metatranscriptomic, and other omics data will beof my goals to obtain an overall view of the activities and the physiological potentialof microbial communities under given conditions at systems level.

Microbes present in the environment largely influences human health and diseases. We are in a period where new diseases are emerging and old ones are spreading at an alarming rate. Even minute changes in the environments can alter the distribution of microbial pathogens and vectors that transmit infectious diseases which can in turn expose to humans as newly emerging or re-emerging diseases.Identifying abundance, diversity, and composition of the microbes and viruses associated with human and animals linked environments can bring some new insight into the role of microbial communities in health and disease.Here my interest is to apply efficient bioinformatics analysis in connection with geospatial metagenomic screening data to answer fundamental questions related to evolution of microbes present in natural settings.