The OSDD centre at Miranda House is involved in “Cloning and expression of selected intraphagosomal expressed genes of Mycobacterium tuberculosis” with the objective to identify important intracellular genes as targets for development of inhibitors which may prove to be potential anti-tubercular drugs. Here Dr Sadhana Sharma is carrying out this project along with co-investigator Dr. Monika Sharma with a very dedicated team of undergraduate students from B.Sc. Hons Zoolgy and Biomedical Sciences and three OSDD project assistants. It is a matter of pride that one of the students Miss Iti Saarav, a research assistant in OSDD project has been selected for PhD program at Zoology department in Delhi University .In order to train the students on various aspects of cloning and expression initially a 1 month long summer workshop on cloning was conducted at the college which was attended by 25 students from the Life Sciences department of Miranda College and students of Biomedical Science course from various other colleges 10 well trained students were shortlisted among the participants based on their performance to execute the cloning project. So far students of MH have been able to successfully clone 4 Mtb genes 10 more genes are in the cloning pipeline. With the cloning projects expected to be completed successfully by November, this team is planning to look into the expression of identified intracellular genes, biologically characterize the gene products and identify their inhibitors
