Our wet lab work emphasizes on the expression and purification of a variety of chimeric chitinases and determining their potency through various antifungal assays. The wet lab also dealt with learning basic lab techniques, the isolation of fungus samples from the campus, confirming the species identities, obtaining pure cultures of the fungus species and performing sanger sequencing using universal primers for identifying the fungus species and making pure cultures of the species identified.
Chitinases are proteins that cleave the glycosidic bonds present in chitin, a major component of the cell walls of fungi. This can lead to cell lysis and resultant mortality. So, utilising the elegance of domain fusion and protein engineering, we aim to create novel chitinases with the potential to show enhanced antifungal activity.
Workflow of wet lab contained mainly the following steps: