Dr Ram Krishna Shrestha

Computational Biologist
Bioinformatics

I am interested in bioinformatics analysis of genomic sequence changes in prokaryotic (virus, bacteria etc) to eukaryotic organisms and genetic expression profiling in plants and animals. I like to develop computational pipelines and workflows for computational analysis of genetic sequences. My PhD work was focused on finding a method for low-cost HIV drug resistance test. I developed a python pipeline that takes in HIV genes (reverse transcriptase and protease) sequence data from samples collected from infected patients, quality controls the data, pools the sequences specific to a sample, maps the data to a standard reference sequence, determines the mutations in the HIV genetic sequences, infers drug resistance for the mutations based on Stanford HIV drug resistance mutation database and generates a patient specific drug resistance report.

I like exploring different bioinformatics open tools, learning the underlining algorithms of the tools and comparing the tools that are basically doing similar analysis.