Gain experience working with mammalian cell lines.Optimize and establish Ribosome profiling using mammalian cell lines infected with the Zika virus.Train and mentor a Ph.D. student to conduct Ribosome profiling on mammalian cell lines infected with the Zika virus.

I pursued my PhD research in Dr. Allen Miller`s Lab in the Plant Pathology and Microbiology Department.My research focused on two different but related topics. Firstly, our lab is interested in translational control of gene expression in virus infected plants and understand how viral proteins and RNA elements can regulate their own protein synthesis as well as the host's. We use Ribosome profiling technique for this purpose. I have also worked on understanding translation control in maize during a persistent unfolded protein response. By performing the bioinformatic analysis for the ribosome profiling and RNA-seq. project, I have gained immense experience in using command-line interfaces such as UNIX, R, and shell scripting on HPC clusters. Secondly, our lab is also interested in viral noncoding subgenomic RNAs and their functional characterization. I have worked with tobacco plants as hosts and studied how a model virus with and without the noncoding subgenomic RNA affects the virus and host gene expression using RNA-seq. More importantly, I have also developed a PCR-based method to quantitatively detect viral coterminal subgenomic RNAs which could only be detected using northern blot hybridization. Compared to northern blots, my new method is extremely quick, much cheaper, with lesser hands-on time, and does not use hazardous materials.

Developing zebra fish as a model for human biology and disease related processes and using a combination of genetics and genomics tools to decipher gene function and genomeorganization in vertebrates.In this study the RP2 gene trap vector was used to identify novel functional loci in the zebra fish genome. Rp2 injected fish were bred to obtain positive embryos and then GFP based 3’RACE was performed to identify the integration loci.