Thursday 27 August, 2026

12:00 AM – 1:00 AM AEST
(Registration provides later access to the recording)

Featured Speaker:

Dr. Dhanasekaran Shanmugam | Chief Scientist,
Biochemical Sciences Division, CSIR-National Chemical Laboratory

Infectious diseases are a major burden on human and animal health. Using genomic approaches, we can better understand how genetic diversity in the pathogen affects disease outcomes and drug resistance. Under the one health framework it is now imperative to study pathogens across human and animal systems, in clinical and environmental samples. This helps in mapping transmission dynamics, pathogen tracing and studying the efficacy of drugs and vaccines.

In this talk, I will discuss the surveillance studies my group has been conducting to track drug resistance in the human malaria parasite Plasmodium falciparum and dairy cattle pathogen Theileria annulata and how these studies provided insights on the genetic diversity of the pathogens. In both studies we have developed and validated multiplexed PCR amplified sequencing by Oxford Nanopore technique.

We are also carrying out surveillance of viral and bacterial pathogens affecting dairy cattle. Here, I will present our work on genomic epidemiology of lumpy skin disease virus and bacterial pathogen detection by metagenomics in mastitis, two diseases which are now adversely affecting dairy productivity in India.

Registration