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Dr. Vigneshwar Ramakrishnan

Coordinator

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Brief History of the Centre:-
The Department of Bioinformatics at SASTRA Deemed University was established in 2002 with initial funding from DBT, GoI. Since then, the department has been training students in the diverse fields of Bioinformatics. Our alumni are placed in various positions in industry (Astrazeneca, TCS Life Sciences, ThermoFisher, etc.) and academia in various capacities and are making a positive impact on the society. The faculty members of the department are actively engaged in cutting-edge research and have secured grants from various funding agencies such as DBT, DST-SERB in the field of bioinformatics. We have also developed several tools and databases that are now used by the scientific community. Having had a strong background in education and research in bioinformatics, the department has now established the Bioinformatics centre with support from DBT that will cater to the evolving needs in the domain of bioinformatics with a specific focus on using informatics driven approach to tackle the challenges in anti-microbial resistance.

Approved Objectives of the Centre:-
1. Identify and analyse missense variants in resistance genes using whole-genome sequence data of multiple resistant strains.
2. Undertake structural and molecular dynamics analysis of the missense variants with & without antibiotic to understand relative changes in structure and conformational ensembles that confer resistance.
3. mploy machine learning methods using features obtained from sequence, structure and molecular dynamics data to differentiate the dynamics of wild and mutants. Identify the features that contribute the most to learning the resistance mutants from the wild type.
4. Survey the mutation space using a sequence-based approach to identify new resistance mutations.
5. Apply the machine-learning framework (step 3) to the resistance mutants identified in step 4 to rank their antibiotic resistance mediating potential.