My research theme revolves around the central objective of being able to efficiently achieve extracellular expression of recombinant proteins from Escherichia coli and their subsequent purification and quantification. This has been a well-researched subject in our group and one of my main goals would be to establish efficient chemostat processes for the same, since continuous cultivation and simultaneous analysis of recombinant product expression has not yet been explored fully. In this direction, to make the chemostat process more industrially attractive and environmentally sustainable, alternative methods for recombinant plasmid selection and maintenance are to be explored , to avoid the use of antibiotics and antibiotic-resistance genes.. The use auxotrophic selection markers in knockout host strains could be cited as an example.
Simulataneously, the behavior of growth rate- dependent promoters (which control the gene for bacteriocin release protein which aids in release of periplasmic proteins to extracellular medium), will have to be studied in the milieu of a chemostat environment, by using techniques such as qRT-PCR to quantify their transcription rate.