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Sarath Chandra Janga, PhD  
Institute for Genomic Biology Fellow,
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign 
Institute for Genomic Biology, 
1206 W. Gregory Drive, MC-195  
Urbana, IL - 61801, USA
Tel: +1-217-244-5404
Fax: +1-217-333-0508 
Email: sarath AT igb.uiuc.edu  

Current research interests

•  Understanding gene regulatory mechanisms in eukaryotic organisms from an epigenetic perspective. The goal of this objective is to study the principles governing histone modifications in eukarya and what governs the histone code.

•  Evolution, prediction and organization of regulatory apparatus in prokaryotes and eukaryotes. This has been a long standing interest and i would like to extend our current understanding from an evolutionary perspective though principally focusing on network-based approaches.

•  Understanding gene regulatory networks at transcriptional and post-transcriptional levels and their general topological properties in prokaryotes and eukaryotes. For instance, at the post-transcriptional level in prokarya an open question is to understand the mechanisms governing small RNA mediated regulation and their prevalance. There is increasing evidence from high-throughput RNA-sequening technologies that this level has been under-appreciated and so one of the goals of this project is to develop methods to predict small RNA mediated post-transcriptional interactions in bacterial systems by harnessing the wealth of publicly available sequencing data and analyze the resulting networks from diverse perspectives. Likewise, post-transcriptional regulation in eukarya also provides enormous oppurtunities to understand the metabolism of RNA in the cell and i plan to extend my research in this direction as well.

•  Functional relationships between gene products to improve annotation strategies using genomic context. I wish to develop strategies for improving annotation in eukarya so here the major focus will be on eukaryotic systems.

•  Integrating diverse kinds of biological interaction datasets like protein-protein, regulatory and signal transduction pathways to understand systems level aspects of regulation and inference of function.

•  Mining genomes for novel antibiotics and to exploit polypharmacological principles to combat mechanisms of drug resistance in bacterial genomes. Here i plan to use both computational and experimental methods to not only identify novel gene clusters from genome sequences which have the potential to encode for small molecules capable of inhibiting bacterial growth but to also employ an integrated approach to understand principles which decrease the rate of antibiotic resistance.

•  Applying network-based approaches in understanding disease biology and in drug discovery settings. This research direction aims to exploit the wealth of publicly available genome sequences as well as small molecule interactions to 1) uncover the principles for efficient development and delivery of small molecules for different classes of drug targets that are being widely studied and 2) understand the design principles of promiscous drugs which are known to have promising therapeutic outcomes and gain deeper insights into what makes natural products so powerful (by using experimental techniques to dissect).