Dr. Zhumur Ghosh
 Principal Investigator

 

Bose Institute
Bioinformatics Centre
P 1/12, CIT Scheme - VII M,
Kolkata 700 054,

INDIA

http://www.boseinst.ernet.in

 

zhumur@jcbose.ac.in

     ghosh.jhumur@gmail.com

 

                                 Fax: +91-33-2355 3886  

 

My research encompasses Regulatory RNAs and stem cell biology.

A fundamental question in stem cell biology is what determines the self-renewal and pluripotency of stem cells? Recent data indicate that RNAi may play an important role in these processes. We aim to understand the role of small regulatory RNAs specially microRNA in the self-renewal and pluripotency of embryonic stem cells(ES cells) and induced pluripotent stem cells (iPS cells). We plan to analyze the miRNA and mRNA microarray data of both ES and iPS cells systematically and investigate the function of individual miRNAs in these and identify their target genes. Moreover, we are presently interested to take a look into the emerging novel regulatory RNAs viz. piRNAs and long non-coding RNAs and their role in cancer.

We are also focused to investigate a small subpopulation of cells identified in cancers that have stem cell properties. These cells hopefully will come up with appropriate answers to the following questions: Why are most cancers difficult to eradicate and easy to recur and metastasize? Why are some tumors resistant to therapy? Why are some tumors highly aggressive? Are we targeting the right cells? Cancer stem cells (CSCs) are thus the cells within a tumor that possess the capacity to self-renew and produce heterogeneous lineages of cancer cells that comprise the tumor. The self-renewing CSC is characterized by continuous expansion of cells in cancer resulting in the development of a tumor, unlike normal stem cells in which the total number of stem cells in a tissue is highly regulated and expansion beyond the normal level is restricted by genetic programs. We aim towards elucidating the key gene regulatory units that reprograms normal cells to CSCs.