Teaching and Research

-Published 2 peer-reviewed publications-Functional prediction for novel cellulases for biofuel production using structural bioinformatics approach along with biochemical assays and phylogenetic analysis.-Predicting novel features in cellulases and predicting three-dimensional models in advance of biochemical assays.

-Published 8 peer-reviewed publications.-Using molecular modeling and molecular simulation techniques for analyzing structures in the Natural product biosynthesis (NatPro), a high-throughput structural genomics project.-Twenty nine structures co-authored in the PDB.-Instructor for BIOC115 course “Freshman Seminar in Local Biology Research”, Rice University (Fall 2013, Spring 2014).-Creating and maintaining an interactive user-friendly setup using stereoscopic HDTV and game controllers for co-located discussions. -Providing computational biology and bioinformatics support via LIMS data management, and website maintenance of www.natprobio.org-Using ACMI for building protein models from low-resolution electron density crystallographic data.

-Published 6 peer-reviewed publications.-Origins of thermostability in endoglucanases:Explored endoglucanases’ thermostability from sequence, structure, and dynamics perspectives using thermophilic and mesophilic protein sets. -Analyzed and compared structural dynamics using elastic network models that indicated that loops may contribute to the thermostability by modulating the direction of correlated motions between the catalytic residues.-RNA-ligand docking studies of next generation antibiotics: Identified potential antibiotics that are better than Neomycin-B against a RNA aptamer. RNA-ligand interactions were predicted through docking. Predictions of a better binder will be verified experimentally in collaboration with researchers at ISU.-Human co-expression network study: Analyzed the network properties of the human coexpression network and made comparisons with other types of biological and non-biological networks. Observed that human coexpression network is not as clustered as the plant coexpression network; the plant genes form a tighter and more interconnected network.-Unknown-eome of Arabidopsis thaliana: Proteins with unknown function (PUF) form a large part of the annotated Arabidopsis proteome called the Unknown-eome. Used machine learning based method to predict the function of unknown proteins employing only the sequence information.

-Published 1 peer-reviewed publication-Compared the SNP sequence data of Mycobacterium tuberculosis KwaZulu-Natal strains and identified nucleotide polymorphisms that result in altered protein structure or synthesis.