Member SpotlightsA Meeting of the Minds: A Bioinformatician and Her Computer Sucheta Tripathy, Ph.D. A Member Since December 2001  As a young child in India, Sucheta Tripathy, Ph.D., was interested in the medicinal properties of plants. Because of this natural attraction, she studied botany in college and went on to earn a master’s degree in plant sciences with a concentration in genetics. She won the prestigious Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) fellowship for her Ph.D. studies in molecular biology and genetics at the Center For Plant Molecular Biology, which is know for its excellence in studies of plant sciences in India. During her graduate studies, Dr. Tripathy investigated genetic transformation in high yielding cotton cultivars using different varieties of Agrobacterium tumefaciens. Because cotton is highly susceptible to insect damage, scientists were hoping to create insect-resistant cotton strains to minimize the usage of environmentally damaging pesticides. However, due to the difficulty in obtaining regeneration in cotton cultivars, the transgenic approach had not yet proven feasible. Dr. Tripathy not only succeeded in obtaining transformants in higher frequency, but also reported regeneration of cotton plants through the callus. After obtaining her doctoral degree, Dr. Tripathy taught at Mumbai University. At the same time, she enrolled in NCST, which is a research and development institution sponsored by the Indian Department of Electronics to learn software technology. On completion of the course she worked as a bioinformatician in the Indian biotechnology industry. During this period she developed an interest in genomics, algorithm development, metabolic pathways, and probe designing. In 2002, Dr. Triptathy left India for the United States to accept a position at the Virginia Bioinformatics Institute (VBI) in Blacksburg, VA. VBI is a pioneer in open source software development for the scientific community. At VBI, Dr. Tripathy leads a team of programmers who help provide support to all the bioinformatics to molecular biologists and plant geneticists. Under her leadership, her team developed the Oomycetes Community Annotation Database (OCAD) and the EST Database for Phytophthora sojae. Dr. Tripathy also created a software program for extracting coding region from EST sequences and validating gene models in genome sequences. All of the group’s databases can be accessed via the VBI microbial database portal at http://phytophthora.vbi.vt.edu. Currently, she is involved several projects including:
Dr. Tripathy has a very close relationship with her computer. She spends almost 16 hours a day in front of it browsing for new innovations in plant genomics and bioinformatics. Her latest passion is deciphering microarray data. And even when she is not officially working on her computer, she often uses it to play chess (as she can easily beat all of her human competitors). ### << Previous Next >> [ View All Member Spotlights ] |
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