Research Projects

Microorganisms are omnipresent and can survive extreme environmental conditions. However, 99% of these microorganisms are “not yet cultured” and do not grow under laboratory conditions using conventional methods. Therefore understanding the reason behind uncultivability and making them available to the laboratory condition is an essential first step to access and use them as a source of metabolites for biotechnological and industrial use. High throughput sequencing has revealed that the vast majority of the uncultured microorganisms have vast metabolic potentials due to the presence of novel pathways and genes which are not yet known for their functions. Therefore, it is crucial to growing the pure form of these organisms in laboratory conditions for a detailed investigation of their functional potentials. In our earlier study on Sambhar lake, we observed that delay in sample processing impacts cell viability because most of the cell dies before we process samples. Therefore we used an approach to enrich samples with specific substrates at the sample collection site to avoid cell death. The current project continues the study initiated during 2019, where samples from Antarctica were collected and processed for community DNA extraction (for high throughput sequencing proposed in the current proposal) and the already isolated microorganisms would be further characterized for their novelty and metabolic potential. cultivation approach. The isolated microorganisms would be