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Expert has developed expertise in metabolic reprogramming during susceptible and resistant interactions of Magnaporthe grisea with host plants, Brachypodium distachyon and rice as well as abiotic stress resistance in plants such as drought or cold tolerance. Such systems present many challenges for both sampling and data alignment and thus Expert has developed and validated new methods for efficient handling of the plant-pathosystem including synchronized and reproducible infection, sampling and monitoring biological and metabolic changes in the most destructive rice blast disease. He has found novel biochemical mechanisms responsible for fungal pathogenesity and mechanisms responsible for host resistance in rice blast disease thus contributed greatly in the field of agriculture. His has developed new expertise in the areas of fungal imaging in infected leaves, staining of ROS and in-situ activity determination of certain enzymes, such as NADP-malic enzyme and shikimate dehydrogenase, to elucidate mechanisms responsible for infection and resistance.

Expert has been running non-targeted and targeted metabolomics fingerprinting experiments from the plant samples from the past three years and has a vast experience of running various instruments including LTQ FIE-MS, FT-ICR-MS, HPLC-PDA, LC-MS-PDA, GC-MS, MALDI-TOF-MS, FTIR, as well as MSn fragmentation both in FT and ion-trap modes. He has developed new protocols for extraction of particular classes of compounds from various plant samples (such as leaves, stems, cell wall, etc) as well as overall metabolites extraction. He routinely use highly reliable methods to validate sampling methodologies using unsupervised and supervised multivariate data analysis, such as PCA, LDA, Random forest, ANOVA, p-values etc. He has a great deal of experience in handling MS data and interpretation of the MS results, investigation of explanatory signals and accurate mass matrix analysis by database searches at high mass accuracy (1ppm) and comparing fragmentation patterns as well as comparisons with known standards. He has also been quantitatively measuring soluble phenolics and phenolics conjugates, phenyl propanoids, aromatic amino acids and flavonoids by HPLC, LC-MS and GC-MS to quantify lignin precursors and flavonoids involved in plant defence. He has also experience of reverse-phase chromatographic seperation of compounds and preparation of samples for NMR analysis.

Expert has indepth knowledge of peptide mass fingerprinting and metabolomics. He has a degree in Bioinformatics too, and has a good programming ability using C-language, PERL (Including, database handling, applications development, providing web interface to PERL programs, and generating real time graphics using GNU plot), JAVA and HTML. He has a good knowledge and use of various algorithms, and reasonable understanding of UNIX and GCG package. He can manage various biological databases using SQL, Microsoft Access and has been part of construction and validation of MZedDB (Tool for the annotation of High Resolution MS metabolomics data). He has experience of using various Bioinformatics related softwares, such as, PrimerSelect, MegAlign, Protean, Rasmol and Swiss-PDB viewer, and peptide mass spectrometric related softwares, such as Voyager-DE Instrument Control, Data Explorer and Biocypher. He has developed in house microbial peptide mass spectrometric fingerprinting database and have experties in rapid identification of unknown microorganisms by MALDI-TOF- mass spectrometry.