The Department offers a two-year Master’s programme leading to the M Sc (Genetics) degree. Starting this year, the course would be taught following a semester system (two semesters per year). The course is interdisciplinary in nature, where in some of the core papers are also offered by other Departments. Apart from core papers, papers in Biochemistry, Biostatistics and Computational Biology are also offered. The Department also offers a set of elective courses. The theory courses are supplemented by hands-on practical training with an emphasis on continuous assessment. At the end of the second semester, the students undertake a 6-8 weeks training in research methodologies in different reputed laboratories of the country. In fourth semester, they are required to present critical reviews on various topics in the form of seminars. A minimum of 30% marks of the total is allotted to internal assessment in each year.
The Department also participates in the M Phil (Biotechnology) programme along with other Departments. Another joint activity of the Department is to organize seminars and symposia. The Department also has an active ‘Genetic Seminar Club’ in which papers are presented on a topic of general interest by all staff and students/members.
The Department has an active Ph D programme. The research interests of the Department are in the area of heavy metal resistance in soil bacteria, and fungi, microbial strain improvement for the production of some useful biomolecules, biochemical genetics of bacteria and fungi, molecular genetic improvement of plant growth promoting rhizobacteria, and biocontrol bacteria, peptide antibiotic production by lactic acid bacteria, metagenomics of soil; DNA marker technology for construction of linkage maps, gene tagging and QTLs mapping in Brassica species, development of transgenic rice, cotton, mustard and vegetables resistant to diseases, pests, environment stresses, modification of fatty acids, delayed fruit ripening and induction of male sterility; genetic engineering of polyamine metabolism for stress tolerance, multigene engineering in tomato and brinjal for stress tolerance; RNAi approach for developing transgenic tomato, brinjal and cotton resistant to disease and pests; analyzing gene-regulatory mechanisms for optimizing transgene expression in plants; Identification of susceptibility genes for complex traits such as schizophrenia, Parkinson’s, Rheumatoid arthritis, Ulcerative colitis etc; Novel gene(s) identification for X-Linked mental retardation and Parkinson’s disease; Pharmacogenetics and predictive medicine and molecular diagnosis of single gene disorders; Drosophila genetics to address some basic questions in developmental biology and cellular and developmental basis of some fatal human diseases and aging; Studying plant-pathogen interactions using Arabidopsis as a model.
Faculty:
Professors:
Dr. Deepak Pental (Plant Biotechnology)
Dr. Sheela Srivastava (Microbial Genetics and Biotechnology)
Dr. Akshay K. Pradhan (Plant Genetics and Molecular Breeding)
Dr. M. Venkat Rajam (Plant Genetic Engineering and RNAi)
Dr. B.K .Thelma (Human Genetics and Medical Genomics)
Reader: Dr. P. K. Burma (Plant Biotechnology and Gene Regulation)
Lecturers: Dr. Surajit Sarkar (Drosophila Cytogenetics)
Dr. Jagreet Kaur (Plant – Pathogen Interaction)
No comments:
Post a Comment