My research work mainly focused on the bacterial diversity and their interactions with different metals in glacio-marine environment of Ny-Alesund, Arctic. With the changing Arctic climate scenario, it is necessary to understand how the microbial communities gets affected and whether there is any difference in the patterns of diversity within different Arctic ecosystems. A combination of culture-dependent and culture-independent approaches were followed to understand the bacterial community structure associated with a land terminating glacier, its foreland and downstream fjord system in Arctic. My work also focused on the metabolic profiling of bacterial communities and individual bacterial isolates so as to understand how they respond to condition changes in different Arctic systems. The role of microbial communities in the fate of Arctic contamination has been identified as a knowledge-gap. In this regard, my study also involved the assessment of metal tolerant bacterial fraction from Arctic (tolerant towards metals such as Hg, Pb, Cd, Ni, Co, Zn and Mn) and understanding the impact of metals on bacterial growth and metabolism which further can provide us light on how metal pollution is affecting even the lower lifeforms which forms the base of the Arctic food chain. The study also addressed the metal bioaccumulation properties of bacteria so as to understand their ability for metal mitigation along with understanding their genomic signatures underlying the metal tolerance using De-Novo whole genome sequencing based approach.
During my tenure as a Project Scientist at NIOT, I worked on understanding the Deep Ocean microbial structure and functional potentials using metagenomic approach. I have also contributed to the understanding of bacterial diversity from the Central and South West Indian ridge sediment and water samples, their underlying functions in the ridge environment along with the characterization of a novel marine exopolysaccharide producing bacterial species Alteromonas pelagimontana from the ridge sediment sample during my tenure as a Research Fellow at NCPOR.