Biography

Aishwarya S. Babu is a Ph.D. student in the Infectious Diseases and Precision Medicine group at the Institute of Bioinformatics, India. She completed her master’s degree in biotechnology. Her research focuses on addressing heteroresistance in Mycobacterium tuberculosis through the development of molecular diagnostic assays, including a hybrid capture assay to assess heterogeneity in clinical samples and an HRM-based assay for detecting minority resistant variants. She has conducted a comparative analysis of GeneXpert and targeted Nanopore sequencing to evaluate heteroresistance. She is also involved in studying the tuberculosis burden among indigenous tribal communities in Karnataka, India.

Expertise

TB Diagnostics
Public Health

Key Impacts

Targeted Nanopore sequencing for early detection of heteroresistance in M. tuberculosis

This study highlights the need for sensitive molecular diagnostics for early heteroresistance detection in M. tb. While GeneXpert MTB/RIF Ultra misses heteroresistance, Nanopore sequencing identified low-frequency resistant mutations, providing a cost-effective, scalable detection tool.

Source: Conference 2024