admission@niet.co.in
+91-8010-500-700
Experience
8 Years
Presently working as Assistant Professor in the Department of Biotechnology, NIET. Previously she worked as a computational biologist, in ICMR-NIMR as a researcher. Dr. Sonia's doctoral research was related to in-silico rational design of the protein-specificity and binding affinity to incorporate novel receptor binding characteristics. Dr. Sonia has expertise in structural analysis of proteins, protein-protein/ligand docking, and molecular dynamic simulations to understand their intricate interaction networks. Dr. Sonia has been published more than 13 research papers in peer-reviewed journals. During her doctoral program, she received a prestigious international fellowship that is Swiss Government Excellence Fellowship to do research at the University of Bern, Switzerland. She has presented her findings at many national and international conferences.
Education
Biotechnology/Bioinformatics, Kumaun University, Nainital, Uttrakhand, India
Computational and Systems Biology, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi, India
Botany, Jamia Hamdard, Delhi, India
Research
Research focused on the application of computational biology to understand various Biological phenomena. The main areas of expertise are protein sequence analysis, molecular modelling, docking, Molecular dynamic simulations, drug designing, virtual screening, NGS analysis (basic), differential gene expression analysis, and disease-causing variant mapping onto the protein sequences.
Key Publications
- https://scholar.google.co.in/citations?user=q76bqeoAAAAJ&hl=en
- Sonia Verma, Soumyananda Chakraborti, Om P Singh, Veena Pande, Rajnikant Dixit, Amit Vikram Pandey, Kailash C Pandey (2022); Recognition of fold-and function-specific sites in the ligand-binding domain of the thyroid hormone receptor-like family; Frontiers in endocrinology.
- Sonia Verma, Dixit Rajnikant, y Kailash C, Cysteine proteases: Modes of activation and future prospects as pharmacological targets, Frontiers in Pharmacology, 2016, 7, DOI=10.3389/fphar.2016.00107
- Sukrit Srivastava, Sonia Verma, Mohit Kamthania, Ajay Kumar Saxena, Veena Pande, Kailash C Pandey, Michael Kolbe (2023); Exploring the structural basis to develop efficient multi-epitope vaccines displaying interaction with HLA and TAP and TLR3 molecules to prevent NIPAH infection, a global threat to human health; PLOS ONE.
- Pant, A., Kumar, R., Wani, N. A., Sonia Verma., Sharma, R., Pande, V., Saxena, A. K., Dixit, R., Rai, R., Pandey, K. C. (2018). Allosteric Site Inhibitor Disrupting Auto-Processing of Malarial Cysteine Proteases. Scientific reports, 8(1), 16193. doi:10.1038/s41598-018-34564-8
- Kapil Vashisht, Sonia Verma, Sunita Gupta, Andrew Michael Lynn, Rajnikant Dixit, Neelima Mishra, Neena Valecha, Karleigh A. Hamblin, Robin Maytum, Kailash C Pandey and Mark van der Giezen; Engineering nucleotide specificity of Succinyl-CoA Synthetase in Blastocystis: The Emerging Role of Gatekeeper Residues; Biochemistry, 2017, 56 (3), pp 534–542, DOI: 10.1021/acs.biochem.6b00098
Professional Distinctions
Recipient of Prestigious International fellowship “Swiss Government Excellence Research Fellowship 2017-2018 for research at the University of Bern, Switzerland. Recipient of “ICMR-Senior Research Fellowship (Aug 2019-Aug 2022)”. Recipient of “Travel Grant by the European Society for Pediatric Endocrinology (ESPE) for attending 57th Annual Meeting of the European Society for Pediatric Endocrinology in Athens, Greece (Sep. 2018). Recipient of CSIR-UGC NET JRF with 63 all-India rank.
Key Research Projects
Crucial malarial proteases: Prediction of crucial residue in HB domain of falcipain-2 for hemoglobin recognition using computational methods.
Inhibitor against malarial proteases: Deduce the mechanism of inhibition of Falcipains by an exosite inhibitor (NAP-07) using docking and MD simulations methods.
Homology modeling of SAP, an odorant binding protein of A. culicifacies which is involved in host finding mechanism.
Transcriptomic and SNP variation studies of Anopheles mosquitos (A. culicifacies, A. stephensi). Developed pipelines and write scripts to process the transcriptomic data related to mosquitos.
Gatekeeper residues mapping in beta-succinyl co-A synthetase of blastocystis using homology modeling.
