Dr. Manish Kumar is an Associate Professor at the Department of Biophysics University of Delhi South Campus, New Delhi India. Main research focus of Dr. Kumar's laboratory is analysis of microbial genomes and proteomes using bioinformatics, chemi-informatics and phylogenomics tools to understand the mechanisms behind evolution and spread of virulence and antibiotic resistance among microbial pathogens. We use molecular modeling and computer-based simulation techniques for structure-based drug designing, translational medicine and protein family based approaches to design and identify drug-like compounds. We predict functional interactions between proteins in metabolic and signaling pathways or protein complexes and use this information to develop new drug targets. We also use Next Generation Sequencing based metagenomic data to analyze the load of antibiotic resistance genes in different biotic reservoirs.

Another major interest of lab is development of annotation pipelines. The information content of genome databases has and being increasing rapidly due to significant reduction in cost of high-throughput gene/genome sequencing. But the annotation pipelines for the same are comparatively less resulting in a large number of incomplete/improperly-annotated genomes. My research group is using and developing ‘in house’ bioinformatics tools for functional annotation of genes, functional and structural prediction of encoded proteins, and reconstruction of metabolic, regulatory and transport networks for complete annotation of the sequenced genomes.