Ocimum Thought Leaders
The winners of the maiden edition of the Genomic Pioneer Awards were announced at the HUGO’s 13th international meeting on the Human Genome on 30 September, 2008.
The Genomic Pioneers Award winners are:
Europe: Dr. Sylvie Chauvaux, Asst Professor, Institut Pasteur, Paris.
Asia-Pacific: Dr. Juergen Pipper, Senior Scientist, Institute of Bioengineering and Nanotechnolog, Singapore.
India: Dr. Srikanta Kumar Rath, Scientist, Genotoxicity Laboratory, Central Drug Research Institute.
Announcing the winners Anu Acharya, CEO, Ocimum Biosolutions, congratulated all the award winners on their achievement and hoped that this would motivate many others to participate in the upcoming editions of Genomic Pioneer Awards in subsequent years.
Dr. Srikanta Kumar Rath, Scientist, Genotoxicity Laboratory, Central Drug Research Institute. Dr Rath has contributed significantly to the field of molecular toxicology and understanding of disease genomics by developing assays for genotoxicity using oligonucleotides and real-time approaches. He has built a tremendous understanding of SNPs in different DNA repair genes in several subpopulations of India and an understanding of gene expression profile of Anti malarials. Dr Rath was one of the key implementors in the creation of Indian Genome Variation Consortium database (IGVdb). Dr Rath’s vision is to develop models to understand toxicity and disease effects. Dr Rath is making efforts to study toxicity and human disease parallely and to make the convergence at some point which will be useful in future for diagnosis.
Gene expression profiling of human blood is becoming increasingly used in the pharmaceutical and diagnostic industries for the discovery and development of clinical biomarkers linked to human disease. The laboratory steps and equipment required to reproducibly isolate white blood cells (WBCs) not only increase the cost but also the elapsed time to RNA isolation.
The manipulations required and time to RNA isolation likely result in altered gene expression profiles. To mitigate this issue, methods have been developed to process whole blood prior to RNA isolation and gene expression analysis. The most useful microarray expression profiling data is generated from whole blood samples in which red blood cells (RBCs) are selectively pre-lysed and the RNA is subsequently purified. However, the abundance of globin mRNA transcripts in RBCs and reticulocytes masks the mRNA contributed by WBCs.
In this report, we compare microarray data from WBCs (the “gold standard” in terms of low globin mRNA contamination), unblocked whole blood and blood samples in which globin cDNA synthesis is blocked using a proprietary globin reduction protocol….
