Bean Group, Core Scientist Current researchI am a core scientist funded by BBSRC. After spending a couple of ‘AQUA-FAANG’ years working on Atlantic salmon and rainbow trout, I have now ventured into the Oyster world! I am currently building a single-nucleus transcriptomic atlas of the Pacific oyster to understand how it responds to infection by Ostreid herpesvirus 1. Using whole-organism transcriptomics, I aim to map how different tissues and immune cells react across the course of infection. Favourite aquaculture speciesOysters for datasets, prawns for dinner. BackgroundI spent my childhood and schooling days in a small Himalayan town — Almora. After receiving my master's degree in biochemistry, I moved to the southern part of India for a CSIR-funded PhD degree at the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology, Hyderabad. My PhD project identified transcriptional regulation of small RNAs in budding yeast facilitated by histone chaperone Asf1. In 2014, I moved to the UK and joined the Pollard lab at the Centre for Regenerative Medicine, University of Edinburgh as a postdoctoral fellow and developed CRISPR-based methods for scalable and efficient epitope tagging in brain tumour stem cells. In 2020, to pursue my bioinformatics aspirations, I joined Dan Macqueen’s lab at the Roslin Institute to undertake ChIP-seq part of AQUA-FAANG consortium. My current role as a core scientist in Tim Bean’s group involves a mix of both wet and dry lab work.[2004 – 2006] MSc in Biochemistry, India[2006 – 2013] PhD, CCMB, India[2014 – 2020] Postdoc, CRM, University of Edinburgh[2020 – 2023] Postdoc, Roslin Institute[2023 - present] Core Scientist, Roslin Institute Interests, hopes and dreamsI love travelling. My other hobbies include wild swimming in Scottish lochs, wild camping, and hiking. I often daydream about working remotely from Mevlana Café in Rhodes or the natural pools of Garachico. PublicationsSynthetic super-enhancers enable precision viral immunotherapySalmonids reveal principles of regulatory evolution following autotetraploidizationAn efficient and scalable pipeline for epitope tagging in mammalian stem cells using Cas9 ribonucleoprotein This article was published on 2024-09-02