Rajindra Napit of Nepal’s Center for Molecular Dynamics visits UK Partners

Rajindra Napit of the Center for Molecular Dynamics (Nepal) visited the UK in November as part of the Epidemic Intelligence programme, visiting partners at LSTM, St Andrews and LSHTM. He also undertook genomic training at Cambridge University for 1 week at the Ian Goodfellow lab at Attenborough hospital.

The training consisted of sequencing QC and quick report generation, the importance of Metadata and Phylogenetics for cluster and epidemiological analysis. After completion of the training, he visited the Sanger Institute in Cambridge for a lab tour and discussion on work such as SARS-CoV-2 genomics, Respiratory virus surveillance and Malaria genomic surveillance with drug resistance analysis.

At the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, Rajindra met with Daniel Ward for discussions on: MTB genomics genotype level detection based on whole genome sequencing, amplicon based targeted assay and Malaria WGS along with drug resistance assay as well as cost-effective MTB whole genome sequencing on MinION (~5-10 pound per sample). He also met with Jody Phelan to discuss MTB data analysis, TB profiler tool and cluster analysis for transmission chain analysis of MTB.

At St. Andrews University, he spent the day with Prof. Derek Sloan’s team to discuss real time MTB growth assay to detect MTB, drug resistance that can be achieved in 4 days. They also worked on diagnostic assay development for TB detection based on 16s rRNA using RNA to detect viable MTB as opposed to DNA.