Page 66 - Annual report 2021-22

Annual Report 2021-22 |

Jitendra Narayan

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Jitendra Narayan's lab mainly focuses on chromosomal breakpoints, horizontal transfer of genes and
genome evolution. His lab has developed a computational pipeline and algorithms to harness the huge
amount of biological data in genomes, epigenomes, transcriptomes, and proteomes to answer specific
biological questions pertaining to these domains.

His lab works on Bdelloid rotifers, which are tolerant to a variety of extreme stresses including large
doses of radiation, desiccation, and freezing. The mechanisms that rotifers use to survive high
radiation doses could help understand how organisms might break and repair their genome for
adapting to extreme environments. In collaboration with Karine Van Doninck, University of Namur,
Belgium the lab is involved in the assembly of the rotifers' genome at the chromosome level to this
end. In addition to that, his lab recently concluded a research study in collaboration with Rajesh
Pandey, wherein they have discovered and highlighted the role of specific lncRNAs in regulating the
CoViD-19 disease severity subtypes as well as different clinical outcomes. Collectively, these studies
greatly expand our knowledge towards understanding the crucial role of lncRNAs in immune and
inflammatory response regulation.

Jitendra’s lab focuses on comparative genomics and recently collaborated with Yusuf Akhter,
Babasaheb Bhimrao Ambedkar University, Lucknow on comparative analysis of extremophilic
bacteria. Here, they analyzed the genomic evolution in extremophilic bacteria using long simple
sequence repeats (SSRs). They observe a positive correlation between G + C content and the RA–RD
of long SSRs. Gene enrichment showed the presence of these long SSRs in metabolic enzyme encoding
genes related to stress tolerance. His findings shed light on mechanisms underlying adaptation,
development, and evolution at the genomic level.

Apart from above mentioned research work, Jitendra’s lab also actively contributed to the recent
COVID surveillance. Understanding the evolution of SARS-CoV-2 using genomic surveillance allows
them to track the spread of such variants across the globe and is believed to be essential for pandemic
preparedness. They contributed data analytic tools to gain insights from the different kinds of
sequencing data. Some of them are listed below:

● Members of the RF consortium advocate data sharing as part of the solution to dealing with
time-varying variants. To address this, they developed and implemented RF Dashboard
http://rock.igib.res.in/, allowing for visual exploration of all RF DATA inflow. They have
processed 11,718 samples and displayed them on the RF-Dashboard.
● While next-generation sequencing (NGS) technology is a reliable method of identifying
potential pathogens in clinical specimens, the most accurate viral genome sequence requires
simple and user-friendly bioinformatics pipelines. Using open-source utilities, they developed
and implemented the SETU and VISANU pipeline for the robust assembling of the SARS-CoV-
2 genome. It entails comprehensive sequence subtraction of host- or non-SARS-CoV-2 NGS
reads prior to de novo assembly, resulting in the rapid and correct assembly of SARS-CoV-2
metagenomic sequences. Using their method, users can quickly and easily assemble, analyze,
and comprehend high-coverage SARS-CoV-2 sequencing data.