About
Summary
I earned my Ph.D. From the University of Pune, India from 1992 to 1997. My thesis was entitled "molecular genetics of plasmid-mediated silver and antibiotic resistances in Acinetobacter baumannii”. Furthermore, I completed one-year postdoctoral research training in the aquatic microbial lab of Mysore University, India in 2006. My research title was "horizontal gene transfer in Gram-negative bacteria". I have been working for 25 years in the department of microbiology and virology, Kerman university of medical sciences, Iran.
Nevertheless, I published more than 86 original research, peer-reviewed papers in different international journals with high impact factors in microbiology and biotechnology. The total impact factor of my research is more than 168, with h-index 14 and hi-index 21. My works were cited more than 296 times (www.scholar.google.com). The research gate score index is 27.18 with a total citation of 854 and Scopus h index of 13. I have also been cited in 3 textbooks on microbiology, published from the USA and Europe. Similarly, I presented more than 42 papers in International and National Conferences and have fundamental contributions in the area of gene transfer, plasmid biology, molecular microbiology, Nanotechnology, and Bioinformatics. I am the reviewer of Biomed central and Elsevier journals. At present, I am an editorial board member of a number of peer-reviewed journals in Iran and abroad. I supervised 4 Ph.D. and 1 post-doctoral scholar for their research. Currently, 2 Ph.D. students are working with me.
Positions
Professor Nov 2021 -
Kerman University of Medical Sciences
The focal points of the research in our lab are plasmid-mediated antibiotic and metal resistance, biofilm formation, and its genes in hospital isolates of Acinetobacter. Quorum sensing and signal transduction in Acinetobacter, and also enhancing bioremediation of heavy metals using genetic engineering organisms, cloning some genes responsible for biofilm formation, and also we are using genetic engineered bacteria for decreasing the CO2 emission. All these steps are subject to elaborate control by numerous regulatory proteins and small effectors. We are working on biogenic nanometals for the disruption of biofilm and introducing potent nanodrugs. Our goal is to achieve the synthesis of nanodrugs with potent antimicrobial and antibiofilm activity and less toxicity. The important factor for my research group also is cost. Nanotechnology allows us to develop a cost-effective drug. My students are working in the molecular design of nanodrugs such as selenium, silver, and copper nanoparticles and delivery system by bioinformatics. Recently we studied the possibility of the existence of antibiotic-resistant islands (ARI) in bacterial chromosomes like Pathogenicity Island and the genes in these islands can transfer effectively by integrons, transposons or by integration with plasmids to other bacterial strains. My team for the first time submitted 8 genes and one integrons class 1 to GenBank NCBI and integral websites. We also found new variant IMP-55 metallo-β-lactamase. Similarly, for the first time, we suggested that iron limitation control the expression of quorum sensing genes in A. baumannii.
Skills
Molecular Biology, Cloning, Sequencing, Real-Time PCR, Gene Mapping Prokaryotes, Unicellular Eukaryotes, Gene transfer in the environment, Conjugation Transformation, Bioremediation, Wastewater effluents, Metals resistance, Biosorption, Bacterial gene expression, Molecular quorum sensing, Microbial Identification by PCR, Biotechnology, Nanotechnology, Bioinformatics.
Keywords: Antimicrobial Resistance,Professional interests
Colistin is the drug of choice for the treatment of carbapenem-resistant Acinetobacter baumannii infections. Unfortunately, the global increase in clinical outbreaks of colistin and carbapenem-resistant A. baumannii infections is on the rise and cause a public health concern. In the present study, a total of 187 A. baumannii recovered from specimens of 240 patients admitted to intensive care units (ICUs) of two hospitals in Kerman, Iran during 2017–2018.
Among the isolates, we found four extensive drug-resistant (XDR) with Minimum Inhibitory Concentration (MIC) ≥4 μg/mL against colistin. The colistin-resistant (Col-R) isolates harbored blaOXA–51 and blaOXA-23 carbapenemase genes, exhibited resistance to all antibiotic classes except tigecycline and ampicillin-sulbactam. They belonged to clonal complex 2, a new MLST type 1752, and displayed identical RAPD-PCR fingerprints. Phylogenetic tree analysis suggested that the Col-R A. baumannii emerged by endogenous mutations rather than the acquisition of preexisting clones. Expressions of pmrCAB by quantitative real-time PCR (qRT-PCR) revealed 8 and 7 folds increased in the transcription levels of pmrB/C genes in strain 1 grown in presence of 16 μg/mL colistin (p≤ 0.01). However, no change in the expression of the pmrA was observed. Furthermore, DNA sequencing of Col-R genes illustrated three nonsynonymous substitutions in the LpxA (N136 → K), LpxC (P293 → Q), and PmrB (V21→ F, S28 → R, I149 → F) in the strains 1 and 3, respectively showing MIC 32 μg/mL against colistin. Multiple amino acids alignments demonstrated several substitutions in the N-terminal region of PmrB. In conclusion, the above results provide valuable insights into the mechanism of Col-R in A. baumannii and the expressions of relative genes.
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