Dr. Rajesh Pandey, Principal Scientist, CSIR-Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology

Biosketch:

Dr. Rajesh Pandey is currently working as Principal Scientist at CSIR-Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology (CSIR-IGIB) and Associate Professor, at Academy of Scientific & Innovative Research (AcSIR), Delhi, India. His area of expertise and research interest focuses on INtegrative GENomics of HOst-PathogEn (INGEN-HOPE), Functional genomics, Non-coding RNA Biology, Single Cell Genomics, Transcriptionally Active Microbes (TAMs), Innovative, cost-effective application of NGS technologies. Dr. Rajesh obtained his Ph.D. in Biotechnology from CSIR-IGIB & University of Pune (India) in 2012 In his post Ph.D. days, Dr, Rajesh has been working as a Research Scientist at MRC Harwell Institute, Oxfordshire, UK and Visiting Scientist at Johns Hopkins University, Maryland, USA Till date he has 86 publications in international journals of repute with a cumulative Impact Factor > 564. These journal includes Frontiers in Immunology. Frontiers in Microbiology, Nature Communications, Nature, Science, Frontiers in Medicine, The Lancet Infectious Diseases, Structure, Genomics, Nucleic Acids Research, Molecular Cell etc.

Title of Talk:

"Immune dynamics in COVID-19 Recovered patients"

Abstract:

Despite several reports of single-cell based understanding of protein-coding genes in COVID-19 patients, there is a paucity of publications related to cell-specific lncRNA function in general and related to SARS-CoV-2 in particular. In this study, we performed genomics based functional characterization of lncRNAs at single-cell resolution in COVID-19 positive and recovered individuals. Our study suggests that cell type-specific differentially expressed (Variant) lncRNAs were associated with immune response-related pathways while the invariant lncRNAs were primarily associated with diverse housekeeping functions. Notably, in addition to their basic immune roles, we found that NK, T, Naive B, Class switched memory B, and Classical monocytes took part in lncRNA-mediated modulation of housekeeping functions. The similar non-random, dynamic distribution of repeat elements within variant and invariant lncRNAs suggest similar regulation of expression for both variant and invariant lncRNAs, making the invariant lncRNAs an important candidate for further research in an infectious disease context.