Research

My research interests have evolved significantly over the years. My formal education has been in Physics and Chemical Engineering, but through sheer serendipity, I find myself working on the cutting edges of Molecular Biology, and I love every moment of it^*.

In a previous life, my first lab experience came with developing monoclonal antibody drugs at Cipla. I did that for a year and soon got an opportunity to work in the Cell Culture Engineering group at CSIR-National Chemical Lab at my hometown in Pune. Here, I worked with LCMS-based untargeted metabolomics datasets and investigated the effect of glucose, glutamine and phosphate deficiency on mammalian cell metabolism.

Right now, I am a PhD student at the University of Florida. I am advised by Dr. Piyush Jain. My current research interest spans the field of genome editing with CRISPR/Cas systems. I am interested primarily in the discovery of novel CRISPR/Cas systems and in engineering existing CRISPR systems for better gene editing and enhanced nucleic acid detection.

For those amongst you who haven’t yet heard about CRISPR or would like to know how it works, please read my introductory article here.

Santosh Rananaware

^*On the days that my experiments work