piyali chowdhury

* Project description: * This project aimed at elucidating the complete biochemical and genetic pathway of 2-naphthol degradation in Burkholderia sp. BC1 with subsequent characterization of key pathway enzymes and study of their evolutionary origins. * Key achievements * Deduced the entire biochemical and genetic pathway for 2-naphthol degradation in Burkholderia sp. using proteomic and genomic techniques leading to the submission of a manuscript in "Applied and Environmental Microbiology" in 2018. * Developed site-directed mutagenesis protocols to study the role of important amino acid residues in enzyme catalysis. * Key skills: * 1. Bacterial Genomic Fosmid-library screening by function and sequence based assays. * 2. Real time PCR. * 3. Gene cloning and expression. * 4. Recombinant protein purification using affinity chromatography. * 5. Sequence and phylogenetic analysis of proteins.

* Project description: * My current project is based on elucidating contact dependent inter-cellular communication mechanisms in bacteria. I work with E. coli as model organism and using traditional gene knock out methods and fitness experiments, I try to evaluate the role of flagella mediated motility, surface adhesion and extracellular DNA in the formation of nanotubes in bacteria and subsequent intercellular metabolite transfer. * Key achievements * Optimized homologous recombination and Scarless-Cas9 assisted recombineering technology to successfully construct various Escherichia coli knock out strains and their subsequent validation by PCR. * Supervised Master, Bachelor and Graduate students in the planning, implementation and successful completion of their research projects. * Key skills * 1. Gene knockouts in Escherichia coli using PCR product based homologous recombination or Scarless Cas9-assisted recombineering. * 2. Experimental evolution and fitness experiments in bacteria.