Title: Characterizing behavior of microorganisms under different scenarios
Speaker: Santosh Pandey, ECpE Associate Professor
Abstract: The world of microorganisms is vast and intertwined with many aspects of human existence. While many microscopic organisms are beneficial for humans, there are several others that can potentially cause or transmit infectious diseases. We are still far from understanding how different microorganisms behave, thrive and form communities, which would eventually help us devise control strategies against them or enable us to grow and engineer artificially grown colonies.
In this talk, I will start by illustrating our research on tracking microscopic worms, including the ones that infect humans and soybean crops. The need for such tracking systems and its applicability in generating key information related to the behavior of parasites will also be explained. I will then describe an efficient method to formulate new drug cocktails for killing parasitic worms in farm animals based on an algorithmic-guided approach and behavioral analysis. The need for such methods of drug formulation is well recognized in this current age where drug resistance or drug tolerance in microorganisms is a widely accepted problem in modern medicine. Later, I will show some techniques we developed to characterize the behavior of bacterial colonies based on large-area scanning systems, which we plan to expand to study communication among bacterial communities. The remaining part of the talk will discuss some of our newer research themes on molecular diagnostics kits.