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Ankita Sharma


Position/Title: Mitacs Postdoc Fellow
email: ankitas@uoguelph.ca
Phone: 2263373875
Office: ANNU 016A

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Education

MastersBiotechnology Engineering, UIET, Kurukshetra University, India (2011)

Thesis: Genotyping and prevalence of rotavirus strains in northern India 

Internship at CSIRO, Melbourne, Australia: Optimisation of transient transfection in insect and mammalian cells 

PhD: Biotechnology, Kurukshetra University, India (2018)

Thesis: Delineating genetic variants of bovine lactoferrin and evaluate their anti-cancer potential in human breast cancer

 

Research Summary

Ankita has obtained her Master’s degree in Biotechnology Engineering (2011) and did her internship at CSIRO, Melbourne Australia, where she worked recombinant protein production using mammalian cell culture bioreactors. Thereafter she joined as Senior Research Fellow at National Bureau of Animal Genetic Resources (NBAGR) and worked there for two years on mammary gland and lactation biology in dairy animals. Her passion for research intrigued her to gain excellence and she started her PhD in 2014. Her work was focused on the characterisation of bovine lactoferrin and she identified protein variants having different structural and functional properties, impacting lactoferrin therapeutic potential. Besides, she assessed the anti-cancer potential of identified variants using human breast cancer cells and gained expertise in cell culture and cellular assays. In parallel, she also joined as Research Associate, where she worked on two extreme environmental stresses: heat stress and high altitude hypoxia. She established the transcriptome of cattle and horses adapted to high altitude hypobaric-hypoxic environment and the molecular-cellular response of cattle exposed to heat stress. After completed her PhD (2018), she joined Animal Biosciences, UoG, as Mitacs Elevate postdoc fellow with Dr. Niel Karrow and industry partner SEMEX alliance; and working on developing an immune stress model to phenotype animals and assess the innate immune response induced by environmental stressors like endotoxins and heat stress in dairy cattle and identify the genetic association with these responses. She is also fervently involved at Food from Thought project: Breeding resilience in livestock, where she has identified circulatory biomarkers (miRNA and cytokines) in endotoxin challenged sheep and working towards the goal of identifying resilience phenotype that can withstand the environmental stressors.

 

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