Venkatesh Lab
Manika Kargeti
Education
B.E (Bio-chemical Engineering), Uttarakhand University, India (2009)
M.Tech. (Chemical Engineering), IIT Guwahati (2012)
Current Status
Research Scholar, IIT Bombay (2012-)
Research Summary
Since childhood my mind wandered about micro-organisms. How do they grow? Why do they grow? Where do they grow? These mind-boggling questions used to trouble me when I saw the diagrams of rod-shaped bacilli and round-shaped cocci in biology course books. So when I got an opportunity to opt for Biochemical Engineering as my B.E. major, I grabbed it.
I have obtained my B.E. degree in Biochemical engineering from Kumaon Engineering College, Dwarahat, Uttarakhand. Four years of graduate studies aroused an immense interest in the field of Bio-process engineering. I learned about a number of diversified applications of Biochemical engineering. I have taken courses like Bio-process engineering, Industrial fermentation, Bio-process plant design, Chemical reaction engineering, Instrumentation and process control, Heat and mass transfer operations, Enzyme engineering etc.
All these courses provided a platform for continuing research in the field of Biochemical engineering, which inspired me to pursue an M.Tech degree i nIIT Guwahati. My research project involved - "Media Optimization and Kinetic Modeling of Escherichia coli to produce a
recombinant enzyme, cutinase". This provided me a perfect foundation for continuing my research career in multi‐scale modeling of biological systems. My aim is to discover the unseen horizons of biological systems i.e., the complex patterns they follow in their growth and production of metabolites. Hence my PhD problem aims to study the complex regulation of metabolism by transcription regulators in micro organisms. This project involves use computational as well as experimental methods to study the link between genotype and phenotype of model organism Escherichia coli.
Specifically, I am studying the effect of transcription regulation under anaerobic conditions by measuring growth and accumulation of metabolites in combinatorial deletion mutants of key transcription regulators.