Biology made interesting with Mendel

“I learn something not because I have to but because I want to”

Dr. Amit Garg, a clinician researcher, told us something on the similar note when asked about his educational choices. Dr. Amit is a MBBS graduate from AIIMS, who is currently working as a researcher exploring the field of genome informatics at IGIB. Here we take you through a set of questions where he briefly talks about his journey from school to studying medicine and now being in a research lab.

To quickly brush upon his memory lane, we started off with a very common question.

Were you always very interested in biology and wanted to pursue medicine ?

ANS: I used to hate biology when I was in school because I always found that subject that just needed a lot of cramming and remembering a lot of names. So my interests were often oriented towards Mathematics, Computers, and Physics. I have always dreamt of becoming an Engineer actually.

From being a staunch hater of biology, how did you end up being in genomics research?

Once I got to read about Mendel and his works on Genetics. I was just awed by the beauty of the results and experiments. It was the first time for me to see an intersection of biology and maths that sparked my interest in biology. The other thing that influenced me a lot was Darwin’s work and taxonomic classification of plant and animal kingdom because these works were based on observations and drawing inference from them. This is how I chose biology as my subject.

Would you like to briefly share with us how you developed interest in research after doing medicine?

I completed my MBBS and learned about healthcare, diseases, and patient care and joined Dr Scaria’s lab where people worked on genome-centric healthcare problems and fiddled with computers, data, and sequencing machines and started finding problems that would interest me. Ultimately, my guide gave me an interesting problem related to founder mutations.

So, what are the founder mutations? 

Every mutation we know is either de-novo or inherited from either of the parents, but the inherited mutation was also at some point of time in the past were de-novo. So, what distinguishes a founder mutation from other mutations. The founder mutations are inherited and are endemic to a population such that offsprings have a chance to inherit the mutations from their parents. If a similar phenotype is observed in patients who belong to a restricted population that has a high degree of inbreeding then all these patients might share the same mutation. Knowledge of these mutations might help clinicians look for diseases that might be present in communities related to the original founder mutation

“Genetics is everywhere and it will never stop to fascinate us !”