Project description:The socioeconomic burden of snakebite in India is largely attributed to the ‘big four’ snakes, completely neglecting the considerable impact of envenoming by many other snake species. Bites from the so-called ‘neglected many’ are often treated with a polyvalent antivenom that is manufactured against the ‘big four’ snakes - a strategy that has been widely documented to fail. Yet, specific antivenoms are not commercially manufactured against these snakes. While the medical importance of various species of cobras, saw-scaled vipers, and kraits is very well-known, the clinical impact of pit vipers from the rainforests of the Western Ghats, northeastern India, and Andaman and Nicobar islands has remained elusive. Amongst the 90+ species of snakes found in the Western Ghats, the hump-nosed (Hypnale hypnale), Malabar (Craspedocephalus malabaricus) and bamboo (Craspedocephalus gramineus) pit vipers can potentially inflict clinically severe envenoming in humans. To evaluate the severity of toxicity inflicted by these snakes, we characterised their venom composition, biochemical and pharmacological activities, and toxicity- and morbidity-inducing potentials. Our findings highlight the therapeutic inadequacies of the generic Indian and Hypnale-specific Sri Lankan polyvalent antivenoms in neutralising morbidity and mortality resulting from pit viper envenomings and underscore the need for a regional antivenom therapy in India.
2023-07-20 | PXD039139 | Pride
Project description:16S Amplicon Analysis for Diversity Analysis of Soil from Thattekad Bird Sanctuary,Western Ghats Metagenome
| PRJNA975300 | ENA
Project description:Western Indian Ocean coral reef microbial diversity
| PRJNA588300 | ENA
Project description:Western Ghats of Maharashtra Biodiversity study
Project description:Soil transplant serves as a proxy to simulate climate change in realistic climate regimes. Here, we assessed the effects of climate warming and cooling on soil microbial communities, which are key drivers in Earth’s biogeochemical cycles, four years after soil transplant over large transects from northern (N site) to central (NC site) and southern China (NS site) and vice versa. Four years after soil transplant, soil nitrogen components, microbial biomass, community phylogenetic and functional structures were altered. Microbial functional diversity, measured by a metagenomic tool named GeoChip, and phylogenetic diversity are increased with temperature, while microbial biomass were similar or decreased. Nevertheless, the effects of climate change was overridden by maize cropping, underscoring the need to disentangle them in research. Mantel tests and canonical correspondence analysis (CCA) demonstrated that vegetation, climatic factors (e.g., temperature and precipitation), soil nitrogen components and CO2 efflux were significantly correlated to the microbial community composition. Further investigation unveiled strong correlations between carbon cycling genes and CO2 efflux in bare soil but not cropped soil, and between nitrogen cycling genes and nitrification, which provides mechanistic understanding of these microbe-mediated processes and empowers an interesting possibility of incorporating bacterial gene abundance in greenhouse gas emission modeling.
Project description:This project mainly aims to characterize the complex toxic components present in the venom of Indian cobra (Naja naja) from the Western Ghats of India. Naja naja (NN) is native to the Indian subcontinent and is also found in Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Southern Nepal. It is a highly venomous snake species of genus Naja of the Elapidae family. They are seen in wide habitats like plains, dense or open forests, rocky terrains, wetlands, agricultural lands, and outskirts of villages and even in highly populated urban areas. This species has been included in the ‘Big 4’ category of venomous snake species that accounts for majority of morbidity and mortality cases in India. Therefore, exploring the venom proteome of Naja naja is decisive to develop and design new antivenom and therapeutics against its envenomation. The venom proteome of Naja naja was characterized through various orthogonal separation strategies and identification strategies. In order to achieve this the crude venom components were resolved on a 12% SDS page. Also, the venom was decomplexed through reversed-phase HPLC followed by SDS analysis. Further each of the bands were subjected to in-gel digestion using trypsin, chymotrypsin and V8 proteases. All the digested peptides were then subjected to Q-TOF LC-MS/MS analysis.