Jenner Club of Microbiology, Conducted a Special Lecture Programme on 17.08.2022.

Dr.D.Dhanasekaran, Associate Professor, State President, Microbiologists Society, India,

Department of Microbiology, Bharathidasan University, Tiruchirappalli delivered a lecture

on the topic of “Actinobacterial Genome Mining for Biosynthetic Gene Cluster Analysis”.

In his lecture he propounded about Metagenomics is the direct genetic analysis of

genomes contained with an environmental sample. The field initially started with the cloning of

environmental DNA, followed by functional expression screening. The broad field may also be

referred to as environmental genomics, ecogenomics or community genomics. He differentiated

genomics and metagenomics is the number of organisms evaluated in an assay or

sample. Genomics studies the genome of a single organism while metagenomics studies the

collection of different organisms' genomes within a sample.

He explained about the Next-generation sequencing (NGS) is a massively parallel

sequencing technology that offers ultra-high throughput, scalability, and speed. The technology

is used to determine the order of nucleotides in entire genomes or targeted regions of DNA or

RNA. He distinguished qPCR technologies, the key difference is discovery power. While both

offer highly sensitive and reliable variant detection, qPCR can only detect known sequences. In

contrast, NGS is a hypothesis-free approach that does not require prior knowledge of sequence

information.