Piyush Lal

Dr. Piyush has 14 years of international research and teaching experience in the field of Microbiology, Molecular Biology and Biochemistry. He has completed his Ph.D. degree from the University of Texas at Dallas in the specialty of molecular and cell biology and has postdoctoral training from the University of Wisconsin – Madison, WI, USA.

In his doctoral research (Dr. Larry Reitzer’s lab), he identified the ATs of arginine (3 ATs) and lysine (4 ATs) synthesis in E. coli and showed how general such redundancy was. His work revealed that certain ATs are extraordinarily redundant and promiscuous and also that these characteristics are conserved traits in evolution, possibly to protect vital cellular functions during stress.

His postdoctoral research work (Dr. Patricia Kiley’s Lab) involved development of genetic tools for Z. mobilis, improvement of gene annotation and development of Z. mobilis strains for robust biosynthesis of biofuels and industrially relevant byproducts. Z. mobilis. The ethanologenic bacterium Z. mobilis is considered a promising candidate for microbial conversion of plant biomass (lignocellulosic biomass/hydrolysate) into biofuel and other valuable products. Like other non-model bacteria, Z. mobilis has several limitations such as lack of facile genetic tools, genetically tractable strains, poor genome annotation etc. To make strain optimization feasible and efficient, he developed genetic tools for Z. mobilis, identified and removed RM systems of Z. mobilis to improve conjugation efficiency of foreign genes. He also performed research for improvement of genome annotation using Tn-Seq approach, which is a high throughput sequencing-aided transposon mutagenesis approach that can analyze phenotype of several thousand mutant phenotype in one set of experiment. Dr. Piyush’s current work involves understanding of virulence factors of Melioidosis causing bacteria Burkholderia pseudomallei.

This work uses comprehensive approach to understand metabolic capabilities and to improve functional annotation of genome. A high throughput Tn-Seq approach will be used in this study to analyze phenotype and fitness of several thousand mutant strains (Tn-library). As the data will measured by averaging across multiple independent transposon insertions in each gene, the results will be very robust in systematic analysis of the role of individual genes for pathogenesis and overcoming antibiotic resistance.

Weblinks of Interest:

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