Dr Pooran Singh Dewari
Email - pooran.dewari@ed.ac.uk
Post-doctoral research in Macqueen lab
I was a post-doctoral fellow funded by the European Commission H2020 project AQUA-FAANG. Together with various academic and commercial partners from European countries, we aimed to create comprehensive ChIP-seq, ATAC-seq, and RNA-seq datasets for the commonly farmed fishes. Our main goal was to identify conserved and divergent functional genomic elements (e.g. enhancers) in different fishes. This will help us understand the role of genetic variation in shaping various traits of commercial relevance (e.g. immune response upon infection). ChIP-seq is my all-time favourite technique; I applied my ChIP-seq experience & skills in this project and hone my bioinformatics skills by taking on new comparative and evolutionary approaches.
Biography and previous work
I spent my childhood and schooling days in a small Himalayan town - Almora. After receiving my master's degree in Biochemistry, I moved to the southern part of India for a CSIR-funded PhD degree at CCMB, Hyderabad. My PhD project identified transcriptional regulation of small RNAs in budding yeast facilitated by histone chaperone Asf1. In 2015, I joined the Pollard lab at CRM, University of Edinburgh as a postdoctoral fellow, and over the next three years I developed CRISPR-based methods for scalable & efficient epitope tagging in brain tumour-derived glioma stem cells. In the past two years, I have used ChIP-seq & bioinformatics approaches in glioma stem cells to identify genomic targets of SOX transcription factors. This has helped us delineate unique and overlapping roles of key SOX transcription factors in brain tumours.
In my leisure time, I enjoy hiking, occasional portrait sketching & landscape photography, learning Spanish (many unsuccessful attempts), and travelling.
Publications
Dewari PS, Southgate B, Mccarten K, Monogarov G, O'Duibhir E, Quinn N, Tyrer A, Leitner MC, Plumb C, Kalantzaki M et al. (2018). An efficient and scalable pipeline for epitope tagging in mammalian stem cells using Cas9 ribonucleoprotein. Elife 7.
Bressan RB, Dewari PS, Kalantzaki M, Gangoso E, Matjusaitis M, Garcia-Diaz C, Blin C, Grant V, Bulstrode H, Gogolok S et al. (2017). Efficient CRISPR/Cas9-assisted gene targeting enables rapid and precise genetic manipulation of mammalian neural stem cells. Development 144: 635-648.
Dewari PS, Ajani F, Kushawah G, Kumar DS, Mishra RK. (2016). Reversible loss of reproductive fitness in zebrafish on chronic alcohol exposure. Alcohol 50: 83-89.
Dewari PS, Bhargava P. (2014). Genome-wide mapping of yeast histone chaperone anti-silencing function 1 reveals its role in condensin binding with chromatin. PLoS One 9: e108652.
Mahapatra S, Dewari PS, Bhardwaj A, Bhargava P. (2011). Yeast H2A.Z, FACT complex and RSC regulate transcription of tRNA gene through differential dynamics of flanking nucleosomes. Nucleic Acids Res 39: 4023-4034.