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The Felowship

International Center for Theoritical Physics (ICTP, founded by a Nobel lauret Prof. abdus salaam), is one of the successful organisations in Europe, promoting science and technology for more than 47 years. ICTP provides fellowship through a programme called "Training and Research in Italian Laboratories" (often called, TRIL) to the deserved scientists in developing countries. Though I belong to the category of Molecular Biology, I was awarded TRIL fellowship to persue research on Coffee genomics in University of Trieste.

Later, I was given Fellow award by International Center for Science and High Technology [ICS - UNIDO] to continue the work in CoffeeDNA, [A database on Coffee Genomics].

Area of work

Presently I am working as Fellow in Unversity of Trieste, Italy from October,2002. The work is basically on Coffee genomics, particularly with 3 major objectives

  • Development of microsatellite markers in coffee as a first step towards making an SSR based linkage map in Coffee.
  • Identifying the largest possible number of SSR based polymorphic loci in Coffea arabica.
  • Curating the available ESTs for the use in CoffeeDNA database.
  • Development of web based database with the available data generated from various experiments in the lab / elsewhere [CoffeeDNA].

Coffee is basically an autogamous crop with a limited genetic base. Though considarable work has been done across the globe, the arabica map has been of great difficult for a long time. Therefore identifying polymorphic loci in cultivated spcies is interesting, but challenging and painful.

Development of web based database is my second attempt. This is conceptually an effort for a graphical display of large amount of information pertaining to coffee genomics generated from Laboratory of Genetics, University of Trieste. The database would also serve as a web portal for sequence analysis using in-house/web resources. Click here for more information.