Research

🔍 Phage Mining

Bacteriophages are the most abundant and diverse biological entities on the planet. We are developing various bioinformatics tools (culture-independent methods) to identify phage sequences in environmental metagenomics datasets and investigate the role of phages in given ecosystems.

🧬 Phage Synthetic Biology

Bacteriophage-bacterial host interactions have been exploited by scientists as tools to understand basic molecular biology, genetic recombination events, horizontal gene transfer, etc. Recent progress in sequencing technologies, DNA manipulation, and synthetic biology allows scientists to engineer phage genomes.

💊 Phage Therapy

Phages have also been recognized and exploited as natural antimicrobial agents, but their potential as therapeutics has not been fully exploited because of challenges such as narrow host range, bacterial resistance, etc. However, increasing concerns related to the emergence of bacteria resistant to multiple antibiotics have highlighted the interest in phage therapy and the development of strategies to overcome hurdles associated with bacteriophage therapeutics.