Research Profile - College of Medicine and Health Science - United ...

Department of Medical Microbiology & Immunology
packaging among retroviruses/lentiviruses.
Over the years, Prof. Rizvi has been able to
successfully compete for and acquire both
intramural and extramural grant support for
his work on retroviruses. Currently Prof. Rizvi
holds a prestigious Wellcome Trust Grant in
collaboration with Professor Andrew Lever
of Addenbrooke's Hospital, University of
Cambridge, UK. Prof. Rizvi has been very
active in supervising and mentoring both the
graduate and undergraduate student. His
current studies on RNA packaging have been
published in journals of international repute.
Professor Tibor Pal - Since 2008 Professor
Pal’s laboratory has been engaged in research
on antibiotic resistant Gram negative bacteria
causing mostly nosocomial infections. The
model organism is an opportunistic
pathogen, Acinetobacter baumannii
responsible for an alarmingly increasing
number of urinary tract, blood stream, wound
in this country investigating strains collected
from five different hospitals (Figure 4). In
these studies molecular based typing
methods, such as various PCR-based
techniques and macro-restriction analysis
are being used. The other project aims to
reveal the mechanisms of antibiotic
resistance in these strains and the regulation
how these genes, mostly beta lactamases of
various spectra, are expressed. It is
anticipated that the results will aid to design
and implement better strategies to control
the spread of this emerging pathogen.
Dr Gulfaraz Khan joined the department in
November 2008. His main research interest is in
oncogenic viruses and viral tumour biology, in
particular, Epstein-Barr virus (EBV) and its
association with human malignancies of
epithelial and lymphoid origin. The current
projects being pursued in Dr Khan’s laboratory
are:
Figure 4: Clonal typing of local isolates (NM90-96) of Acinetobacter baumannnii by a combination of
multiplex PCR reactions.
and pulmonary infections with high mortality.
It is a highly clonal organism; the strains
causing outbreaks worldwide represent a few
genetic lineages only. The outbreak clones are
multidrug resistant, often resistant to drugs,
such as carbepenems, also
considered as last reserves for serious Gram
negative infections. In one of our projects
we study the clonal distribution of the isolates
(1) The role EBV plays in the pathogenesis of
breast cancer and Hodgkin lymphoma.
(2) The mechanisms by which the two
abundantly expressed non-protein-encoding
EBV RNA molecules (EBER-1 and EBER-2) inhibit
apoptosis and promote cell transformation. We
have developed a highly plausible model which
we are currently testing (Figure 5).
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