Hrishikesh Dhondge

PhD from Université de Lorraine (CAPSID team at LORIA-INRIA, CNRS)

Boinformatician 💻

Background

This is Hrishikesh Dhondge. I was born and brought up in the state of Maharashtra, India. I completed my primary school from my native town, Bahaddarpura. For further studies, I joined Jawahar Navodaya Vidyalaya, Shankarnagar(Nanded). I completed my Secondary school and Higher Secondary school from there.

Then, I went to MGM’s College of Computer Science & Information Technology, Nanded for my Bachelors. I obtained B.Sc. in Bioinformatics from there. During this time, I learnt the basics and developed interest in programming. Later, I decided to join the Centre for Bioinformatics, Pondicherry University. I obtained M.Sc. in Bioinformatis from there. During this time, I also did a summer internship at Bose institute (Kolkata, India), where I worked on next-generation sequencing (NGS) data analysis and machine learning. My Master’s thesis focused on DNA-based data storage systems, having developed a system with a storage density of 1 byte per two nucleotide base pairs without any compression, and based on hexadecimal data instead of binary data.

Later on, I joined the CAPSID team (Université de Lorraine, CNRS, Inria, LORIA) in Nancy, France. My PhD thesis was part of a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Innovative Training Network (MSCA-ITN) project, RNAct, aiming to design novel RRM-containing proteins for exploitation in synthetic biology and bio-analytics.
During my PhD work, I started with the manual inspection of experimental structures from Pfam families to curate the list of Pfam families corresponding to the RRM domain type and built the InteR3M database. One of the criteria was to check how certain structural instances of Pfam RRM domain families were classified in CATH known as a structure-based domain database. This led me to propose an original approach to solve this issue, based on the Cross-Mapping of Structural instances (CroMaSt) of RRMs between these two domain databases and on the structural alignment of unmapped instances with an RRM structural prototype.
The thesis manuscript will be publicly available soon. If you are interested in reading it, please check back later this month.