Natural Product Chemistry, Alternative Medicine, Phytochemistry, Bioinformatics, Immunology, Vaccine Development.
Areas of Expertise
i) Biochemistry & Molecular Biology: cell culture, media preparation, centrifugation, DNA and RNA extraction, cDNA preparation, insert and vector DNA preparation, plasmid DNA preparation, ligation and electroporation, western blotting, gene expression analysis by microarray and qualitative/quantitative real-time PCR, RT-PCR, gel electrophoresis, molecular cloning, and use of hemocytometer.
ii) Immunology: in vivo immunization, in vitro imaging system (IVIS), intracellular cytokine staining (ICS), ELISPOT; to identify the level of B or T cell stimulation, immunological methods to identify and quantify expression of proteins, cytokine and antibody ELISA, cell culture and maintenance, light microscopy, fluorescent microscopy.
iii) Microbiology: aseptic and sterile techniques, microscopy, bacterial staining, plating methods (streak/spread/pour), enumeration and identification of bacteria, use of biological safety cabinets, media/buffer preparation, an antimicrobial study by disc diffusion and turbidity methods.
iv) Chemistry: solution preparation, titrations, extractions filtrations, solubility tests.
v) Computational drug design and discovery: Medicinal chemistry, Protein modeling, and dynamic simulation, in silico ligand structure and fragment-based drug design, Chemical modeling and chemoinformatics, Gene-protein and Protein-protein interaction analysis etc.
vi) Experience in general animal (mouse) husbandry, managing the breeding of numerous transgenic, and knock out mouse strains. Also experience in transgenic mosquito’s maintenance.
vii) Software: Various molecular modeling and CADD software. Operating Systems: Mac OS, Windows Vista, Windows XP.
viii) Statistical Analysis: Graph pad Prism and SPSS (Statistical Software Package).