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.

I. Evolution of antibiotic resistance among gram-positive priority pathogens

• Evolutionary genomics and structural bioinformatics approaches to understand the genetic, structural, and phylogenetic characteristics of multidrug resistant strain
• Reconstruction of the evolutionary dynamics of major membrane transporters involved in drug inactivation

II. Tackling of antibiotic resistance among gram-positive priority pathogens

• Discovery of novel antibiotic adjuvant molecules & antimicrobial peptides.
• Discovery of novel Biomarkers for the identification of multidrug resistant strains
• CNN based model development for the detection of resistant strains of priority pathogenic bacteria from colony images