Nidhi Gupta Poster 2023

Dr Nidhi Gupta

University of Delhi South Campus, India

Adjuvants for vaccine: receptor ligand based molecular interaction to discover adjuvants for human toll like receptors

Poster Abstract

Human immune cell toll-like receptors (TLRs) provide a novel chance for the development of the vaccine adjuvant engaging TLR signaling. A library of peptides was developed and peptides structure was generated through homology modeling and refinement. Further, these peptides were subjected to receptor-ligand interaction study against human immune cell TLRs using Schrödinger-suite software. Here, we identified the most potent ligands for each human immune cell receptor and identified it as a potent adjuvant. This work portrays the ability of binding of different known protein adjuvants with human TLRs 1--10. The significance of the study deals with the identification of adjuvant (ligand) for human TLRs individually which assist in the development of the optimal highly immunogenic vaccine.

Biography

I take this opportunity to introduce myself as Nidhi Gupta, currently working as a Young scientist (under a scheme of Department of Health Research, Govt. of India) at University of Delhi South Campus, New Delhi, India. I am working on the vaccine development of human pathogens. Simultaneously, I am also working on other projects on which my lab is working i.e. Drug discovery and Drug repurposing. We have developed several vaccines for human infectious diseases and now moved in the direction of expression of hypothetical proteins (multi-epitope vaccine).

I have completed my Ph.D. from the University of Delhi, India, in 2018 and the title of my thesis was “Identification and Characterization of promoters for Toxin-Antitoxin loci of Mycobacterium tuberculosis”. During my Ph.D., my main focus was to understand the transcriptional regulation of Toxin-Antitoxin loci in M. tuberculosis. In this journey, I have developed several tools for eg. reporter vectors to identify and characterize the promoters and selection vectors to screen genome wide promoter libraries. As a founding member of the lab, I have also standardized methods for the isolation of pure and highly integrated total RNA from M. tuberculosis.