Prof Giri to unravel structure, action of Zika

Dipender Manta

Dr Rajanish Giri from the the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Mandi, is conducting a research to unravel the structure and action of Zika virus through computational research and biophysical studies. 

He is being assisted by Vladimir Uversky from the University of South Florida and  research scholar Pushpendra Mani Mishra. The team uses computer programmes to understand the protein structure of the virus, which will be valuable in designing therapeutic agents to treat viral infections.

Dr Giri said studies on the virus and the development of antiviral drugs used to be time-consuming and complex because the virus had to be grown in a laboratory for study. The advent and advancement of bioinformatics in the past decades had eased virology  research now. 

“The database of viral proteins and genes are now available, which help with rapid computational analyses of the virus to provide a better understanding of their action on the host.  Viral bioinformatics has, in turn, offered fresh perspectives in the design of drugs and therapeutic methods to combat virus-borne illness” he added.

The Zika infection is a mosquito-borne illness, much like dengue and chikungunya, although viral transmissions through infected blood and sexual contact are also possible.

“We are using molecular recognition feature (MRF) analysing  computational tools to identify the MRF regions in proteins of the virus. We have used protein information from a Zika virus protein database called UniProt, as reference to confirm the protein sequence in a particular strain of Zika, called Mr 766.  The disorderliness of the cofactor region (NS2B Region) of a particular enzyme protein (NS2B-NS3) has been confirmed using a technique called circular dichroism spectroscopy,” he added.

Workshop on techological advancements 

A five-day international workshop on “Applied deep learning” was organised by the MANAS group, SCEE, IIT-Mandi and BITS Pilani on the Kamand campus. Students from IIT-Mandi and other participants participants, including scientists from government organisations, faculty members from technical institutes, software engineers and postgraduate and undergraduate students from various colleges across the nation, attended the workshop. The workshop was aimed at edifying the theoretical and practical aspects of the recent technological advancements in the deep-learning area. Speakers introduced the concept of machine learning and computer vision to the participants. Advance topics such as autoencoders, VAE, Siamese networks, GAN and RNN were also covered in depth.

Orientation programme for freshers  

An orientation programme was organised to welcome the new batch of BTech. Director, IIT-Mandi, Timothy A Gonsalves said 194 students had got admission in the course through JEE (advanced).