Sanchita Kamath

CV / Scientific Career

Research Interests

Community diversity is affected by several biotic interactions and abiotic factors, such as the surrounding environmental conditions. Environmental conditions change with time and can fluctuate dramatically when impacted by episodic disturbances. Communities' response to disturbance has been a central interest in ecology studies for decades. More specifically, investigations have aimed to resolve how disturbances in an ecosystem influence the diversity of the communities. During my PhD, I would like to investigate the rate at which microbes evolve during such events. I plan to achieve this by integrating multi-omics data from multiple sources and then using genome-scale metabolic construction to predict the changes in its functionality.

In my thesis, I hypothesize that microbial Communities evolve rapidly during disturbance events. I can test this hypothesis by answering the following research questions:

1. Does studying Provenance of data in multiomics studies help reduce mistakes and save resources?
2. Are Incomplete genomes sufficient to study evolution in complex microbial communities?
3. Can we identify the functional capacity of microbial communities during disturbance events?
4. How can the knowledge I gain in my thesis be helpful to those without deep knowledge in computer sciences?

I have presented my work in 2 VAAM conferences and 1 ISME conference in Capetown.