Scientist & Group Leader

Arunkumar did his undergraduate and postgraduate degrees in Agriculture from UAS, Bangalore. During post-graduation he worked on characterization of novel Bacillus thuringiensis isolates and plant tissue culture. For doctoral research he joined CDFD, Hyderabad in 2003 and studied Genetics, Genomics and evolutionary biology of silkmoths mainly using DNA sequences of both transcribed and un-transcribed regions of the genome. Arunkumar was involved in development of two sequence analysis databases namely WildSilkBase and SilkSatDb that are widely accessed by researchers throughout the world. Apart from silkworm biology, he also worked on identification of unusually long palindromes in the origin of replication region (Control region) of Insect and nematode mitochondrial genomes. After PhD, he moved to Caltech for Post-Doctoral research in Prof. Bruce Hay's lab. There he worked on gene regulation in Drosophila to develop novel gene drive system. He is interested in Genetics, Genomics and evolutionary biology of animals, and genetic engineering of Insects.

Publications

• Arunkumar KP and Nagaraju J (2011) Drosophila intersex orthologue in the silkworm, Bombyx mori and related species. Genetica 139:141-147.PDF
  
  
• Arunkumar KP, Mita K and Nagaraju J (2009) Silkworm testis specific genes are enriched on Z chromosome and are evolutionarily conserved. Genetics 182: 493-501. PDF
  
  
• Arunkumar KP, Kifayathullah L and Nagaraju J (2009) Microsatellite markers for the Indian golden silkmoth, Antherae aassama (Saturniidae: Lepidoptera). Molecular Ecology Resources 9: 268-270. PDF
  
  
• Arunkumar KP, Tomar A, Daimon T, Shimada T and Nagaraju J (2008) WildSilkbase: An EST database of wild silkmoths. BMC Genomics 9: 338. PDF
  
  
• Arunkumar KP and Nagaraju J (2006) Unusually long palindromes are abundant in mitochondrial control regions of insects and nematodes. PLoS ONE 1(1): e110. PDF
  
  
• Gandhe AS*, Arunkumar KP*, John SH, Nagaraju J (2006) Analysis of bacteria-challenged wild silkmoth, Antheraea mylitta (Lepidoptera) transcriptome reveals potential immune genes. BMC Genomics 7:184. (*equal contribution) .PDF
  
  
• Arunkumar KP, Metta M and Nagaraju J (2006) Molecular phylogeny of silkmoths reveals the origin of domesticated silkmoth, Bombyx mori from Chinese B. mandarina and paternal inheritance of Antheraea proylei mitochondrial DNA. Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution 40: 417-427. PDF
  
  
• Prasad MD, Muthulakshmi M, Arunkumar KP, Madhu M, Sreenu VB, Pavithra V, Bose B, Swaminathan S, Nagarajaram HA, Mita K, Shimada T and Nagaraju J (2005) Silksatdb: a microsatellite database of silkmoth, Bombyx mori. Nucleic Acids Research 33: D403-D406. PDF
  
  

Review/Book Chapter

• Sarkar S, Singh MB, Yadav R, Arunkumar KP and Pittman G (2011) Heat Shock Proteins: Molecules with assorted functions. Frontiers in Biology (In Press)
  
  
• Nagaraju J, Arunkumar KP, Sriramana K, Muthulakshmi M, Satish V, Madhu M and Subbaiah EV (2004) Silkworm genomics on fast-track. In: Frontier Areas of Entomological Research (Eds. Subrahmanyam, B., Ramamurthy, V.V. and Singh, V.S.). Proceedings of the National Symposium on Frontier Areas of Entomological Research, IARI, New Delhi, India, Nov.5-7, 2003 (Invited Lectures), PP 471 - 485. (Book chapter)
  
  

Contact information

Email: arun<at>cdfd.org.in
Phone: +91-40-24749345

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