Research expertise

Sheeba Santhini Basil earned her Master's (M.Sc and M.Phil) in Microbiology from India. Before heading to the University of Iceland (UI) for her Ph. D, she worked as a lecturer in India, teaching molecular biology, microbiology, and bioinformatics. She pursued her doctoral studies in collaboration with the University of British Columbia, Canada, while teaching lab courses at UI (Methods in molecular biology, genomics, genetics and bioinformatics -2013). She obtained her PhD in Biology with specializations in molecular genetics and bioinformatics (https://english.hi.is/events/ doctoral_defence_in_biology_sheeba_santhini_basil). She sought to understand the mechanisms of symbiosis in the lichen Peltigera membranacea by using DNA-Seq, RNA-Seq and BS-Seq that were used to characterize the genome, tissue-specific transcriptomes and methylomes of the lichen, respectively. In addition, she discovered a new lichen Peltigera islandica.

Before joining the Institute of Tropical Medicine, she worked as a post-doctoral researcher at the Department of Plant Genetics, University of Liege, and characterized the clonal transcriptome of Chlamydomonas reinhardtii using an unbiased thermodynamic maximal-entropy-based approach (surprisal analysis).

Sheeba joined the unit of Prof. Chris Kenyon as a Scientific Fellow to investigate the genotypic and phenotypic diversity of the pathogen Neisseria gonorrhoeae and dissect the interaction of the pathogen with the commensal bacterium in different niches. She continues to study antimicrobial resistance and horizontal gene transfer in Neisseria spp. using various methods, including genomics, transcriptomics, shotgun metagenomics, and molecular microbiology approaches.