Sayak Ganguli

Biography

I am a core biologist by training, adept in the basic identification of plant taxa and experimental elucidation of variation both at the structural and functional levels. During my post graduate studies, I was able to develop micro propagated Dolichos plants successfully.
In the year 2007, I joined Presidency College (Elevated to University in 2010) as a Research Assistant at the Centre for Bioinformatics (Funded under the DBT - BIF - BTBI program). Here my primary duties were to analyze complex biological datasets from numerous collaborating organizations - Bose Institute (Plant Data), NICED (HIV, HBV associated data) , BMGC Kolkata (NGS based evolutionary analyses)etc.
Apart from the analyses, I was also entrusted with the responsibility of supervising the dissertation projects of Post Graduate students from the intramural departments of the institute as well as extramural students selected through interview. Added to this was conducting and organizing bioinformatics workshops and training programs for teachers, researchers and students.
My doctoral studies dealt with the “Characterization and Structural Analyses of Plant Glutathione Peroxidases” where I was able to develop sequence based clustering method using Self Organizing Maps and correlate the findings with traditional phylogenetic analyses. Apart from this I also studied the interactions of key ligands - glutathione and hydrogen peroxide with the various glutathione peroxidases from different plant kingdoms and correlate them with their conserved structural features. I have been working with small bioactive compounds and have prepared a screened library of 850 hits from an initial library of 25600 compounds, effective against Ebola and Shigella proteins.
My current position as an Assistant Professor in one of the top ranked institutions of the country - St. Xavier’s College (NIRF rank 7 in 2020) has enabled me to explore my teaching prowess into areas of Biotechnology that I have not taught before; specifically core classical genetics and Plant Breeding. Apart from this I am also taking up classes in Genomics, Plant Biotechnology, Biostatistics and Computational Biology.
MY LAB: Environmental Genomics, Computational Biology and Bioinformatics
Research for sustainability is the theme of the lab. We apply genomics to investigate environmental issues, understand marginalized ethnic people and their habitats as well as their food habits and livelihood patterns. Along with that we also collaborate with academic institutions to understand drug repurposing and study complex pathogen genomes with the help of computational biology and bioinformatics tools.