Rammohan Shukla Rammohan.Shukla

I am an expert in both computational and experimental biology and my career goal is to utilize and update these skills further to become an independent researcher working on systems biology and networks associated with complex brain disorders. I have a very diverse and international training trajectory and my interest in systems biology and academic career started together at Tamilnadu Agriculture University, India, in MSc bioinformatics program when I was exposed to the complexity of the genome while performing data mining with available rice genome sequence. Following this, I worked as a research associate in the department of entomology, Central Institute of Cotton Research, Nagpur, India for two years where I studied the biodiversity of insect pests using mitochondrial genome sequences. Here I learned to have an evolutionary perspective for understanding biological systems. During my PhD studies with professor Tetsuo Yamamori at the National Institute for Basic Biology, Okazaki, Japan, I was trained in various aspects of molecular biology and histology, and my project involved exploring the comparative anatomy of serotonin system, including the serotonin receptors and projections in macaque, marmoset and mouse brains (1, 2). The conserved serotonin infrastructure in these evolutionarily distant animals highlighted the importance of carrying out a mechanistic investigation of receptor functions in a mouse model. Motivated by my previous skills in basic research and interdisciplinary experience, I joined the newly established lab of professor Etienne Sibille at the University of Toronto, where I took a reverse translational approach to understand the process of aging using an age by disease interaction model, whereas the trajectory of age-related changes overlaps with that of several mental illnesses, hence studying ageing will provide a baseline evaluation on molecular homeostasis. So far I took lead in two key projects. In first, I adopted a translational approach to understand the process of aging and its effect on neuronal cells of cortical microcircuits. In this project, I spearheaded the task of establishing robust single cell-type collection and RNA sequencing technique and developed bioinformatics analysis pipeline to interpret the resulting data (3). In the second project, I have investigated molecular changes underlying major depressive disorder using RNAseq in human postmortem samples (4). In this work, I have identified specific ontologies associated with pathological changes in various phase of depression and test novel therapeutics (in mouse models) based on large-scale transcriptomic data available for various drugs/perturbance. Starting March 2019, I will be joining Professor McCullumsmith, Chair and director of neuroscience department, university of Toledo. In collaboration with professor McCullumsmith, I will be focusing on incorporating my skills in genomics and network analysis to identify conserved disease signatures in human and mouse to predict drug and drug targets (gene and pathways which are the cause of disease phenotype) which can be tested in a mouse model. 1. Shukla R, Watakabe A, Yamamori T (2014): mRNA expression profile of serotonin receptor subtypes and distribution of serotonergic terminations in marmoset brain. Front Neural Circuits. 8: 52. 2. Takahata T, Shukla R, Yamamori T, Kaas JH (2012): Differential expression patterns of striate cortex-enriched genes among Old World, New World, and prosimian primates. Cereb Cortex. 22: 2313–21. 3. Shukla R, Prevot TD, French L, Isserlin R, Rocco BR, Banasr M, et al. (2018): The relative contributions of cell-dependent cortical microcircuit aging to cognition and anxiety. Biol Psychiatry. . doi: 10.1016/J.BIOPSYCH.2018.09.019. 4. Tomoda T, Sumitomo A, Shukla R, Hirota-Tsuyada Y, Miyachi H, Oh H, French L, Sibille E (2018): BDNF controls neuropsychiatric manifestation via autophagic regulation of p62 and GABAA receptor trafficking. bioRxiv. 334466.

Toledo, OH, USA

Assistant Professor

University of Toledo

Rammohan Shukla