Areas of Interest/Specialization

1. Microbiology: Spreading and Sterilization; Basic microbiological techniques for isolation, purification and culture media preparation; Gram Staining; Pour plating; Preparation of bacterial smear; Different types of streaking; Measurement of bacterial growth by turbidometry & Serial dilution technique. Maintaince of HCH degrading and non-degrading Sphingomonads and E.coli strain.

2. Molecular Biology: Soil DNA isolation, Genomic & plasmid DNA isolation from Prokaryotes, Gene Cloning and sequencing in prokaryotic system, PCR, Gel Electrophoresis, Restriction digestion of plasmid DNA, DNA-DNA Hybridization, Transformation of plasmid DNA into E. coli.

3. Enzymology: Preparation of enzyme extract, Protein expression, His-tagged protein purification by FPLC and manually. SDS-PAGE, Enzyme assays and Enzyme kinetics. Protein purification from Inclusion body. Protein refolding (on column refolding and without column) and protein dialysis.

4. DNA Sequencing: Designing the gene sequencing primers using Oligo Analyzer, Gene runner and Bioedit software and sequencing the 16S rRNA gene sequence by using ABI Sequence Analyzer software.

5. Chromatography: Thin Layer Chromatography (TLC), Column Chromatography, Gas Liquid Chromatography (GLC), Gas Chromatography-Mass Spectroscopy (GC-MS), High Performance Liquid Chromatography (HPLC) and Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) for the identification of epsilon HCH isomer and its metabolites.

6. Scientific Computer Software: Phylogenetic analysis (PHYLIP, TreeconW, MEGA and Eztaxon), ClustalX for Multiple sequence alignment, ClustalW, BioEdit, Sequence analyzer software for assemble the nucleotide sequence, RDP–Ribosomal Database project software, DNA-STAR and Clone Manager for sequence analysis, Vector NTI, Adobe Photoshop, Image J software, End Note, MS-word, PowerPoint and Excel.