Antimicrobial resistance is an escalating global health concern, and the discovery of antibiotics is in crisis. Our group applies various complementary research strategies to address the problem of antibiotic resistance. The first is the rational chemical modification of existing, obsolete antibiotics to impart additional modes of action thereby enhancing their bioactivities. We are also interested in developing novel small molecular therapeutics, and antibiotic adjuvants which target bacterial resistance mechanisms, bacterial virulence, and host-cell factors that are required for pathogen infectivity.

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Natural product antibiotic drug discovery is another area that we are interested in. Microbial natural products have been the mainstay of our antibiotic arsenal. Antibiotic producers carry self-resistance genes to avoid suicide and often transfer the resistance genes to pathogenic bacteria in an ecosystem. We use these self-resistance genes as a guide to finding antimicrobial producers and new antibiotics. Further, potential secondary metabolite producers beyond actinomycetes (Gram-negative microbes) and symbiotic microorganisms of Indian ayurvedic medicine are of our interest in order to isolate bioactive natural products.

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Additionally, our research spans to other infectious disease drug discovery areas including antifungals, antimalarials, antihelminthics and antivirals. Moreover, we are interested in understanding cross talks between microbial infections and other important diseases like Alzheimer’s and cancer, etc. whether antimicrobial drugs can help cure such diseases.

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Our team's research expertise ranges from organic chemistry to allied biosciences such as antibiotic synthetic biology, microbiology, molecular biology, biochemistry, and pharmacology.

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Research areas

• Infectious diseases, antimicrobial resistance, antimicrobial drugs

• Medicinal chemistry, drug design, and development

• Natural product drug discovery and their biosynthesis

• Bioactivity-guided natural product purification and characterization

• Genome mining and genome engineering

Teaching

CH117 - Undergraduate (B. Tech) laboratory course (Autumn semester, 2022)

CH540 - Drugs and biologically active compounds (Spring semester, 2023 and 2024) 

CH209 - Basic Organic Chemistry (Autumn semester, 2023 and 2024)

CH231 - Organic chemistry laboratory course (Autumn semester 2023)

CH228 - Organic chemistry laboratory course (Spring semester 2024, 2025)

CH305 - Chemistry of Functional Groups  (Spring semester, 2024) 

CH304 - Chemistry of Biomolecules (Spring semester, 2025)