Research

The descendants of those who migrated Out-of-Africa, have expanded close to six orders of magnitude numerically and inhabit by now most of the continents. It can be assumed that their genomes preserve huge amount of information about this process – both in form of random mutations, including recombination, as well as by changes triggered by natural selection and pathogen pressure. The problem is how to infer this information from gene pools of the ancient and present-day plethora of human populations. Currently, at Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi, India, my group and I are interested in the demographic history of South and Southeast Asia and their role in old world peopling. We are tracing the role of migration, drift, and selection in the peopling of South Asia by using various kinds of uniparental and biparental genetic markers. We are trying to find out the answers to the various problems by the use of available computational tools and developing new in-house scripts. We further use this information as a foundation to understand the complex disease genetics of South Asians. 

During the Pandemic, our focus also extended towards genomics and suveillance (sero and viral) of COVID-19 in Varanasi and adjoining region. Our essential background in the knowledge of genes and ancestry helped us to take on the challenges of COVID quickly, and we became one of the most visible labs during this pandemic. The team used a novel approach to understand the population level susceptibility and published more than 15 high-quality research papers on it. They had forecasted the third wave and its impact on the Indian population, accurately.