Dr. Sutharsan Govindarajan receives prestigious INSPIRE Faculty award
Department of Science and Technology, Government of India has awarded Dr. Sutharsan Govindarajan, Assistant Professor, Department of Biological Sciences, SRM University-AP, the prestigious fellowship “Innovation in Science Pursuit for Inspired Research (INSPIRE)”. This initiative provides funds and a platform to potent young achievers for conducting independent research and strengthening the Science & Technology base. Dr. Sutharsan is to receive a total research grant of 35 lakhs for a period of 5 years as a DST-INSPIRE fellow.
Dr. Sutharsan will establish an independent research lab at SRM University, AP, Andhra Pradesh to focus on CRISPR-Cas biology. “CRISPR technology is a powerful tool for editing genomes. It is capable of changing a single base of DNA out of billions of bases. This invention is potent to cure genetic disorders, enunciating its candidature to receive the Nobel Prize in the future.”, informs Dr. Sutharsan.
Dr. Sutharsan’s research work has the potential to nullify the single limitation of the CRISPR technology- ‘off-target’ effects i.e., unintended base changes that affects the accuracy of DNA editing. Through his research titled “Discovery of novel CRISPR-Cas silencing proteins”, he and his team intend to prevent ‘off-targets’ by identifying and characterizing the novel anti-CRISPR proteins that can inhibit in CRISPR-Cas proteins. Dr, Sutharsan believes, “This will improve the efficiency of CRISPR technology which will be highly useful for gene editing technologies, alleviating a wide range of genetic disorders and diseases in the future”.