Spotlight on Paresh Purohit
Paresh Purohit was awarded a Newton Bhabba PhD Placement to work in the Tokatlidis group. Here, he writes about his experience at Glasgow and time in the group:
'Hello, I am Paresh Purohit a Doctoral Research Student at CSIR-Institute of genomics and Integrative biology, New Delhi, India. CSIR is ranked among world’s top 9 public research institutes in 2017 according to business standard.
I am working here in the mitochondrial biogenesis lab with Professor Kostas Tokatlidis at the Institute of Molecular Cell and Systems Biology supported by a grant of the Newton-Bhabha PhD Placement 2017. This is an international collaborative program between the UK and India as part of the UK Newton Fund to support science and innovation partnerships. The visits are jointly funded by the British Council in the UK and the Department of Biotechnology in India. This award was a first step towards building a new research partnership between CSIR-Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology and IMCSB at UoG. My placement is for 4 months. My experience about Scotland and Glasgow cannot be described in one sentence. I landed here at Glasgow airport in the middle of the night on the 2nd June, 2017. The temperature difference was very drastic, between 45⁰C when I left India and 10⁰C when I landed in Glasgow! The unpredictable weather of Glasgow was annoying for the first few days but then I started loving it; raining in rays was delightful to see. It was very mesmerizing to see ancient architecture and historic castles for which Scotland is famous. Scenic beauty of the island all around the country makes Scotland worth living in. The people of Glasgow I came across are modest and helpful. The piping music of Scotland was something that my ear loved to listen to.
During the four month research project I was exploring the regulatory roles of microRNAs on mitochondrial bioenergetics and import. I have learned how to use the Seahorse XF24 flux analyser to estimate mitochondrial metabolic flux and how to analyse the assembly and function of mitochondrial electron transfer complexes including techniques like BN-PAGE. The interesting results I have obtained, suggest a potential respiratory defect in breast cancer cells upon overexpression of microRNAs and will form the basis of a publication to be submitted hopefully soon.
Professor Tokatlidis is not just a wonderful mentor but a brilliant scientist and human being. It’s been a lifetime experience having discussions with him. His suggestions are helping me a lot in my PhD project. The best part of working here in the KT lab is the focus, efficiency, optimal access to resources and the whole support system and infrastructure that ensured rapid progress. I have never faced any trouble in getting resources for my experiments. It was unusual for me to see that one is getting his lab consumables within two or three days of its order placement. The way science is being done here in the UK is quite different from India, but I loved it. It used to be more of discussion on certain topics than one-way communication during our lab meetings. Everyone of the KT research group (Mauricio, Ru, Amelia, Alison, Erika, Sara, Mollie) is very courteous. Especially, it was very amazing to discuss some scientific or non-scientific topics with Ruairidh and Mauricio. These guys have helped me during my experiments as well. I am very much thankful to Prof Tokatlidis for giving me the opportunity to become a part of his research group and this will definitely help us to make some longer term collaboration between the Indian and UK research groups. As a closing statement I would like to say that I am really gonna miss this place; I am gonna miss my Glasgow days'.
