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Dr. Ramesh Aggarwal's Lab

I would still say, CCMB is my dream world, where I learnt how to do research. Here is my first Post doc. An excellent experience for 3 years with Dr. Ramesh Agarwal's lab, known for stringency in work, excellency in performance. Joined on Jan 2000 and resigned on October, 2002.

The work...

I was involved in the project, “DNA fingerprinting of Coffee (Coffea species) Germplasm and development of molecular linkage map” with the following objectives

  • Molecular characterization of the coffee germplasm maintained in total Indian germplasm
  • Generating basic materials (molecular markers/mapping populations) as a prelude to molecular (DNA) markers based coffee breeding programme

Some of the Milestones in PDF1

The whole germplasm maintained in India for crop improvement have been typed using molecular markers such as ISSR, RAPD, AFLP and in-house developed microsatellite markers.

The controversies in evolution of Coffea have been uncovered through sequence based polymorphism using ITS region of nuclear rDNA, trn. region of mitochondria and 16s rDNA region of chloroplast. The in-house. SSR markers showed better PIC value than the markers developed through nucleic acid public domain database.

An amount of ~ 0.24 MB of arabica genome has been sequenced. It is seen that AT repeat is the most prevalent in coffee genome followed GA and CA. Studies on assessment of relative abundance of STR motifs in coffee genome using southern hybridization based slot-blot approach revealed that relatively coffee genome has limited abundance of repeat motifs.

In addition, an user-friendly, web-interface has already been developed (Exploring coffee/Mulberry Genome) using simple html, driven by macromedia® Flash. This is a graphical display of large amount of information pertaining to coffee genomics generated from Dr. Ramesh Aggarwal's lab, Center for Cellular and Molecular Biology, India. This database is currently under the process of ‘fine-tuning' and would be available to the public as a mirror in the web page of Department of Biotechnology (DBT), India. This database is particularly appreciateed by DBT.