Dr. Brijesh Kumar

• Studying dilated cardiomyopathy (DCM) and heart failure (HF) using CRISPR/Cas9 generated disease model • Cardiac phenotyping of cardiomyopathy-related genes in the DCM disease model • Transcriptome and meta-analysis of heart failure omics data • Training master's students and conducting lab practicals

• Mining, annotation, and analysis of COPD-associated genetic variants (GWAS) from SNP databases • Established Prime editing using mammalian cell lines and lung organoids • Prepared targeted CRISPR screening libraries (CROPseq) • Culturing primary lung cells and lung organoids

• Studied zebrafish disease model of Congenital disorders of glycosylation (CDG) • Drug-testing for phenotype recovery in the zebrafish model • Cellular and embryonic enzyme activity analysis • Performed gene expression analysis

• Led drug/target discovery projects related to diabetes and beta-cell regeneration • Executed drug-discovery screen to identify hits promoting beta-cell regeneration by potentiating alpha-to-beta cell transdifferentiation • Collaborated on genome-wide secretory gene over-expression screen, identified candidate genes enhancing insulin expression levels • Generated mutants for cardiovascular and pancreas-related genes using CRISPR/Cas9 in zebrafish

• Co-led collaborative project on genome-wide expression screening of metabolism-related genes • Carried out process optimization, scale-up, troubleshooting and analysis along with molecular biology reagent generation • Performed high-throughput bacterial culture, plasmid preparation, RNA synthesis, in situ hybridization and embryo imaging • Contributed to the image annotation, development and maintenance of gene expression database