Diabetes affects almost 537 million people worldwide and 71 million people in India. Diabetic Foot Ulcers (DFUs) are a dreaded complication of Diabetes and 15-25% of diabetic patients run the risk of developing DFU in their lifetime. DFU infections are polymicrobial and bacterial biofilm formation in chronic wounds leads to persistent antibiotic resistance often resulting in limb amputation and de
ath. Conventional culture-based methods cannot detect the viable but non-culturable (VBNCs) microbes. Massively parallel sequencing can identify both culturable and non-culturable microbes collectively termed as the microbiome. My research interest is to characterize (a) longitudinal shift in the composition and diversity of DFU microbiome both pre and post antibiotic treatment, (b) biofilm formation by confocal microscopy and (c) antibiotic resistance profiling of clinical isolates. Besides these, I will also identify host gene expression patterns in different cell types in chronic non-healing DFUs and integrate it with metagenomic as well as clinical factors to understand their contribution in impairment of wound healing.
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