The Institute of Microbial Technology (IMTECH) is a premier research institution in the Indian subcontinent. In true justification of our name, we are dedicated to carry out integrated research in classical as well as emerging areas of microbiology. Our aim is to obtain fundamental scientific insights, and also to develop novel technologies from these. While browsing through our website, you will find that our researchers have achieved both national and international recognition for their accomplishments.

We hope that you will find the information provided on our web pages useful. For more information please feel free to contact us.

Head

Dr. Suresh Korpole

Yeasts and Patent Depositary

: Head.mtcc@imtech.res.in : 01726665705

Section Incharge

Dr. K. Suresh

Section Incharge: Other Services

: Suresh@imtech.res.in : 01726665159

Scientist

Dr. K. Suresh

Scientist: Bacteria

Contact Address:

Microbial Type Culture Collection & Genebank (MTCC)
Institute of Microbial Technology
Sector 39A, Chandigarh – 160036
India
Phone no: 0172-2636680-94 (Ext: 3155)
Email: suresh@imtech.res.in; korpole@gmail.com

Write-up of research and development interests/focus, past and present goals:

Microbial diversity studies of various aerobic and anaerobic ecosystems and their biotechnological applications

Prokaryotes are the dominant form of life on earth and they found to survive under any conditions of the biosphere. We are using an integrated approach to understand the nature of free-living prokaryotes by studying microbial diversity and their ecology. This information provides an insight into the systematics of these prokaryotes and their biotechnological applications. Microorganisms existing in complex environments often require capability to produce antimicrobial compounds as a competitive advantage to producing strains for their establishment in these ecosystems. Although many bacterial strains produce antimicrobial peptides as defensins, only few of them have been characterized in detail. Therefore, our laboratory mainly focused on isolation and characterization of novel antimicrobial peptides including different types of bacteriocins from microbial diversity of aerobic and anaerobic ecosystems. To this effect, we have characterized few antimicrobial peptides produced by strains of Brevibacillus laterosporus. Further antimicrobial peptides produced by other bacterial strains including Bacillus, Paenibacillus, Lactobacillus and Clostridium species are being investigated. The AMPs were purified by HPLC and characterized by MALDI MS/MS analysis. The analyses of the antimicrobial peptides suggested that these strains also produce antimicrobial lipopeptides. My lab is also actively involved in determination of total microbial diversity using both culturable and culture independent approaches. As a part of culturable diversity characterization, we have determined the taxonomic status of few novel prokaryotic strains as novel genera and species.

Significant recognition: Awards, fellowships, international funding of distinction, technologies transferred/licensed etc.:

DBT Biotechnology Overseas Associate (long-term/one year): To avail the award worked as an “Associate” with Prof. William B. Whitman at Department of Microbiology, University of Georgia, Athens, GA, USA.

Selected list of Publications and Patents:

Selected Publications:

Santi M. Mandal, Shalley Sharma, Anil Kumar Pinnka, Annu Kumari, Suresh Korpole* (2013). Isolation and characterization of diverse antimicrobial lipopeptides produced by Citrobacter and Enterobacter. BMC Microbiol, 13:152.
Piyush Baindara, Santi M. Mandal, Niharika Chawla, Pradip Kumar Singh, Ani Kumar Pinnka, Suresh Korpole (2013). Characterization of two antimicrobial peptides produced by a halotolerant Bacillus subtilis strain SK.DU.4 isolated from a rhizosphere soil sample. AMB Express 3:2.
Sukhpreet Kaur, Mir Yawar, P. Anil Kumar, K. Suresh (2013). Hungatella effluvii gen. nov., sp. nov. an obligate anaerobic bacterium isolated from effluent treatment plant and reclassification of Clostridium hathewayi as Hungatella hathewayi comb. nov. Int J Syst Evol Microbiol (In press) doi:10.1099/ijs.0.056986-0.
Mandal S.M., Porto W.F., De D., Phule A., Korpole S., Ghosh A.K., Roy S., Franco O.L. (2013). Screening of serine protease inhibitors with antimicrobial activity by iron oxide nanoparticles functionalized with dextran conjugated trypsin and in silico analyses of bacterial serine protease inhibition. Analyst, In-press doi:10.1039/C3AN01132A.
Pradip K. Singh, Chittpurna, Ashish, Vikas Sharma, Prabhu B. Patil and K. Suresh (2012). Identification, Purification and Characterization of Laterosporulin, a Novel Bacteriocin Produced by Brevibacillus sp. strain GI-9. PLoS ONE 7(3): e31498. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0031498.
Krishnamurthi, S., Stefan Spring, Anil Kumar P., Mayilraj, S., Hans-Peter Klenk, Suresh, K. (2012). Desulfotomaculum defluvii sp. nov., a sulfate-reducing bacterium isolated from the subsurface environment of a landfill. Int J Syst Evol Micobiol.
Thomas J. Lie, Kyle C. Costa, Boguslaw Lupa, Suresh Korpole, William B. Whitman, and John A. Leigh (2012). Essential anaplerotic role for the energy-converting hydrogenase Eha in hydrogenotrophic methanogenesis. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 109: 15473-15478 (doi:10.1073/pnas.1208779109).
Vikas Sharma, Pradip K. Singh, Samriti Midha, Manish Ranjan, Suresh Korpole and Prabhu B. Patil (2012). Genome sequence of Brevibacillus laterosporus strain GI-9. J Bacteriol 194(5): 1279.

: Suresh@imtech.res.in : 01726665159

Dr. P. Anil Kumar

Senior Scientist: Bacteria/ Phototrophic bacteria

: Apinnaka@imtech.res.in : 01726665728

Dr.V.Venkata Ramana

Senior Scientist

: Venkat@imtech.res.in : 01726665749

Dr. S. Krishnamurthi

Scientist: Extremophiles & Human Microbiome

Write-up of research and development interests/focus, past and present goals:

The lab is engaged in research work related to understanding structure of microbial communities in different marine habitats of the country as systematic sampling of these sites is lacking and diversity data pertaining to these ecosystems are scanty. One of the aims is to understand bacterial diversity from Western Ghats that are one of the major biodiversity hot spots of the world. We aim to focus on sampling selected niches from coastal part of the state Goa and attempt to cultivate hitherto “uncultivated and/or difficult to culture” bacteria. One of our targets is to utilize this overwhelmingly complex bacterial diversity for discovering novel biomolecules with applications in clinical and/or pharmaceutical industry with the premise that “marine habitats offer an increased opportunity for discovering novel biomolecules in lieu of the unique selective pressures of the marine ecosystem where chemical and physical conditions differ significantly from the terrestrial environment that have resulted in production of novel compounds to aid in their survival”.

The emphasis of the research group is also concentrated on detailing the abundant bacterial fraction from various environmental habitats using molecular tools such as FISH and CARD-FISH in collaboration Max Planck Institute of Marine Microbiology, Bremen. These techniques are free from biases of PCR based methodologies and can help detect the uncultivable and/or viable but not culturable bacterial cells from phylum to genus level depending on the specificity of the probes.

Significant recognition: Awards, fellowships, international funding of distinction, technologies transferred/licensed etc.:

Awarded the Max Planck Group (MPG)-DST visiting fellowship for the year 2011

Selected list of Publications and Patents:

Deepika Pal, Navjot Kaur, Sarabjit Kaur Sudan, Bhavna Bisht, Srinivasan Krishnamurthi & Shanmugam Mayilraj (2018). Acidovorax kalamii sp. nov., isolated from a water sample of the river Ganges. Int J Syst Evol Microbiol. 68, 1719-1724.

Sarabjit Kaur Sudan, Deepika Pal, Bhavna Bisht, Narender Kumar, Vasvi Chaudhary, Prabhu Patil, Girish Sahni, Shanmugam Mayilraj & Srinivasan Krishnamurthi (2018). Pseudomonas fluv- ialis sp. nov., a novel member of the genus Pseudomonas isolated from the river Ganges, India. Int J Syst Evol Microbiol. 68, 402-408.

Deepika Pal, Ayanka Bhardwaj, Sarabjeet Kour Sudan, Navjot Kaur, Munesh Kumari, Bhawana Bisht, Bhawna Vyas, Srinivasan Krishnamurthi & Shanmugam Mayilraj (2018). Thaurea propionica isolated from a downstream sediment sample of the river Ganges, Kanpur, India. Int J Syst Evol Microbiol. 68 341-346.

Deepika Pal, Ayanka Bhardwaj, Navjot Kaur, Sarabjeet Kour Sudan, Bhawana Bisht, Munesh Kumari, Bhawna Vyas, Srinivasan Krishnamurthi & Shanmugam Mayilraj (2018). Fictibacillus aquaticus sp. nov., isolated from downstream river water. Int J Syst Evol Microbiol. 68, 160-164.

Ashish Verma, Yash Pal, Anup Kumar Ojha, Harald Gruber-Vodicka, Peter Schumann, Syed G. Dastager, Srikrishna Subramanian, Shanmugam Mayilraj & Srinivasan Krishnamurthi (2017). Examination into the taxonomic position of Bacillus thermotolerans Yang et al., 2013, proposal for its reclassification into a new genus and species Quasibacillus thermotolerans gen. nov., comb. nov. and reclassification of B. encimensis Dastager et al., 2015 as a later heterotypic synonym of B. badius. Syst Appl Microbiol. 40, 411-422.

Ashish Verma, Anup Kumar Ojha, Yash Pal, Parveen Kumari, Peter Schumann, Harald Gruber-Vodicka, Syed G. Dastager, Rameshkumar Natarajan, Shanmugam Mayilraj & Srinivasan Krishnamurthi (2017). An investigation into the taxonomy of “Bacillus aminovorans” and its reclassification to the genus Domibacillus as Domibacillus aminovorans sp. nov. Syst Appl Microbiol. 40 , 458-467.

Present group members:

Ashish Verma: SRF

Yash Pal: SRF

Pooja Yadav: JRF

Poonam Kumari: SRF

Joyashree Das: JRF

Praveen Kumar: JRF

Past group Members

Anup Kumar Jha: Project Assistant

Shivasundharam: Project-JRF

: Kmurthi@imtech.res.in : 0172666748

Technical Staff

Dr. Dhan Prakash

Senior Technical Officer (Molecular Characterization : Bacteria, Yeast & Fungi)

: Dhan@imtech.res.in : 01726665730

Dr. S Muthukrishnan

Senior Technical Officer (Bioinformatics/Data Center)

Publications:

1. Muthukrishnan, S* and MunishPuri*.(2018). Harnessing the evolutionary information on Oxygen binding proteins through Support Vector Machines based module. BMC Research Notes 11:290
2. Muthukrishnan, S*. (2018). Using Chou's general PseAAC to analyze the evolutionary relationship of receptor associated proteins (RAP) with various folding patterns of protein domains. Journal of Theoretical Biology 445, 62-74.
3. Muthukrishnan, S*.(2016) Classify vertebrate hemoglobin proteins by incorporating the evolutionary information into the general PseAAC with the hybrid approach. Journal of Theoretical Biology, 409, 27-37.
4. MuthuKrishnan, S, Munish Puri, Kanak L. Dikshit, and Christophe Lefevre. (2016) “BacHbpred: Support Vector Machine Methods for the Prediction of Bacterial Hemoglobin-Like Proteins,” Advances in Bioinformatics, vol. 2016.
5. MuthuKrishnan, S, Puri, M*., & Lefevre, C. (2014). Support vector machine (SVM) based multiclass prediction with basic statistical analysis of plasminogen activators. BMC Research Notes, 7(1), 63.
6. Muthukrishnan, S., Puri, M*., & Lefevre, C. (2013). Analysis and Prediction of Major Blood Proteins Based on Their Amino Acid and Dipeptide Composition. International Journal of Bioinformatics Research, 5(1), 285-288.
7. Muthukrishnan, S., Aarti Garg, and G. P. S. Raghava. (2007). "Oxypred: Prediction and Classification of Oxygen-Binding Proteins." Genomics, Proteomics & Bioinformatics 5.3: 250-252.