About me

I competed my Bachelor’s and Master’s in Biotechnology in India and decided to go ahead in research. I started my research journey as research fellow with Phase Labs, IIT Delhi based startup lab and then with Rakesh Sharma’s lab at CSIR-IGIB, India. Working with different labs helped me in gaining a lot of important skills that guided me to choose my PhD project. I started my PhD journey in 2019 with Indrajit Lahiri’s lab in India. The project excites me because it allows me to gain experience in cryo-EM and biochemical techniques. While gaining experience in enzyme kinetics, I have had my first author publication in Biochemistry, 2022. In 2022, Lahiri lab moved to Sheffield and I had a great chance to became part of White rose DTP.

My Project

Aim of my project is to understand the mechanism of apicoplast DNA polymerase (apPol), which is organellar DNA polymerase inside apicoplast, a non-photosynthetic plastid like organelle present inside plasmodium. Working on apPol excites me because it belongs to a family of polymerase that had less explored, only one polymerase inside a system generally that is not the case with the polymerases, so it has to do multiple jobs and has to deal with very complicated substrate while replication. Apprehending these questions will allows me to acquire skills in cryo-electron microscopy, sm-FRET and biochemical techniques. Eventually, these will potentially help in developing drug targets against malarial parasite.