New Delhi, Delhi, India
For my Master's thesis, I worked on cloning and expressing cellular splicing factor genes, specifically the SRSF6 to understand how disrupted alternative splicing contributes to cancers and neurological disorders. Under the guidance of Dr. Dibyakanti Mandal, Assistant Professor, Amity University Noida, I built functional research tools through protein cloning and expression that can support downstream studies on viral transfection and cellular response to infection. My hands-on work spanned the full experimental pipeline from PCR amplification, agarose gel electrophoresis, and molecular cloning to bacterial transformation, plasmid DNA isolation, SDS-PAGE, Western Blotting, and mammalian cell culture
During this internship, I worked on cloning and analyzing genes of Chandipura Virus, a high-risk pathogen that causes encephalitis in children under 15. The focus was on cloning Chandipura Virus genes to understand the virus's rapid replication mechanism, which is key to vaccine and drug development. Under Dr. Dibyakanti Mandal, Assistant Professor, Amity University Noida, I handled RNA extraction, cDNA synthesis, RT-PCR, molecular cloning, bacterial transformation, and plasmid DNA isolation.
Contributed to a research project titled "To Determine the Cause of Neonatal Mortality in the North-East Region of India”, under the supervision Dr. Fouzia Siraj, Scientist E, ICMR- CCP (Former ICMR-NIP) . I contributed to the isolation of the total nucleic acids from blood, cerebrospinal fluid, stool and nasopharyngeal fluid from post-mortem cases of neonates, children under-five and stillbirths while working under Class II biosafety conditions. Furthermore, I also gained practical exposure to Immunohistochemistry to study NF-κB nuclear and cytoplasmic expression and protein analysis methods including SDS-PAGE and western blotting.
Worked on the Identification of the Sibling Species of Anopheles culicifacies under the guidance of Dr. Ritesh Ranjha, Scientist C, ICMR NIMR, focusing on the identification and differentiation of this important malaria vector. Carried out DNA extraction from mosquito samples, after which standard PCR amplification was done for amplification of the target gene. Performed agarose gel electrophoresis to visualize the sizes of amplicons, allowing for species-level determination and differentiate the sibling species of Anopheles culicifacies. Additionally, acquired hands-on exposure to microscopy, staining techniques, and dissection of mosquitoes