Dr. Manish Kumar Lab

The main research focus of my laboratory is the analysis of microbial genomes and proteomes using bioinformatics, chemi-informatics, and phylogenomics tools to understand the mechanisms behind the evolution and spread of virulence and antibiotic resistance among microbial pathogens. We use molecular modeling and computer-based simulation techniques for structure-based drug designing, translational medicine, and protein family-based approaches to design and identify drug-like compounds. We predict functional interactions between proteins in metabolic and signaling pathways or protein complexes and use this information to develop new drug targets. We also use Next Generation Sequencing-based metagenomic data to analyze the load of antibiotic resistance genes in different biotic reservoirs.
The information content of genome databases has increased rapidly due to a significant reduction in the cost of high-throughput gene/genome sequencing. But the annotation pipelines for the same are comparatively less resulting in a large number of incomplete/improperly annotated genomes. My research group is using and developing our own, ‘in-house’ bioinformatics tools for functional annotation of genes, functional and structural prediction of encoded proteins, and reconstruction of metabolic, regulatory, and transport networks for complete annotation of the sequenced genomes.