Staff Profile

Educational Qualification

M.Sc., MPhil.,PGDBI.,Ph.D.,

Personal Statement

Dr. V. Umashankar is a bioinformatics scientist with over 23 years of experience in computational biology, genomics, and structure-based drug discovery. Currently Scientist F at ICMR–National Institute for Research in Tuberculosis (NIRT), Chennai, his research spans infectious disease genomics, ocular bioinformatics, peptide therapeutics, structur based drug discovery and precision medicine. He has contributed to SARS-CoV-2 genome sequencing, Gene silencing in vitro, dual RNA-seq studies to understand host–pathogen interactions in tuberculosis, and phytochemical-based therapeutic discovery. His expertise includes next-generation sequencing analysis, molecular modelling, and multi-omics integration. He has developed widely used bioinformatics tools including POAP, PepVis, ACUA, and OpenDiscovery, and has authored over 147 peer-reviewed publications advancing computational genomics and translational biomedical research.

Research Focus

• Bioinformatics and Computational Genomics

• Infectious Disease Genomics (Tuberculosis, Viral pathogens)

• Structure-based Drug Discovery and Peptide Therapeutics

• Systems Biology and Multi-omics Data Integration

• Development of Bioinformatics Tools, Databases and Computational Pipelines

Ongoing projects as Principal investigator

• Dual RNA-Seq based capturing of transcriptomic interplay among Mycobacterium tuberculosis infected non-phagocytic human cell lines (ICMR Intramural)
• National Mycobacterial Drug Resistance Mutational Catalogue Development V.2.0 (ICMR Intramural)
• Pan-India Antigenic Characterization of Dengue Viruses: Early Warning Signal for a Potential Pandemic (PM-ABHIM, as Co-I)
• Surveillance of Zoonotic Respiratory Viral Infections in Animal Farms from Thiruvallur District, Tamil Nadu: A One Health Approach (PM-ABHIM, as Co-I)
• Harnessing T-Cell Repertoires (TCR) and Metrics of Diversity and Clonality for HIV Vaccine Development (IAVI funded, Co-I)

Significant Publications

• Secker B, Nayak A, Husain AA, Arora S, Nag A, Shrivastava SK,..Umashankar Vetrivel et al. Metagenomic insights into the urban-rural variation of antimicrobial resistanceand pathogen reservoirs in untreated wastewater from Central India. Front Microbiol. 2026;16:1722229.

• LakshmanaPerumal K, Vetrivel Umashankar. Computational drug repurposing reveals potential alanine racemase inhibitors for combating drug-resistant tuberculosis. Biologia. 2025:1-18.

• Barathi L, Sharada R, Vetrivel Umashankar, Srujana C. Virtual screening and multilevel precision-based prioritisation of natural inhibitors targeting the ATPase domain of human DNA topoisomerase II alpha. J Biomol Struct Dyn. 2023:1-9.

• Stockdale SR, Blanchard AA, Nayak A, Husain A, Nashine R, Dudani H,..Umashankar Vetrivel et al. RNA-Seq of untreated wastewater to assess COVID-19 and emerging and endemic viruses for public health surveillance. Lancet Reg Health Southeast Asia. 2023;14.

• Vivekanandan S, Hanna LE, Vetrivel Umashankar. Design of HIV-1 neutralizing peptides targeting CD4-binding site: an integrative computational biologics approach. Front Med. 2022.

• Jeyalatha MV, Vetrivel Umashankar, Harinee R, Lakshmipathy D, Ganesan S, Biswas J,Anand AR. Draft genome sequence of Mycobacterium tuberculosis strain SNMICRO 2047-20 isolated from intraocular infection. Microbiol Resour Announc. 2022.

• Singh I, Vetrivel Umashankar, Harish DR, Chattopadhyay D. Coding-complete genome sequences of NITMA1086 and NITMA1139, two SARS-CoV-2 isolates from Belagavi District, Karnataka State, India, harboring the D614G mutation. Microbiol Resour Announc. 2021;10(6):e00016-21.

• Vetrivel Umashankar, Deshpande SH, Hegde HV, Singh I, Chattopadhyay D. Phytochemical moieties from Indian traditional medicine for targeting dual hotspots on SARSCoV-2 spike protein: an integrative in silico approach. Front Med.2021;8:672629.

• Ansar S, Vetrivel Umashankar. PepVis: an integrated peptide virtual screening pipeline for ensemble and flexible docking protocols. Chem Biol Drug Des. 2019;94(6):2041-2050.

• Samdani A, Vetrivel Umashankar. POAP: a GNU parallel-based multithreaded pipeline of Open Babel and AutoDock suite for boosted high-throughput virtual screening. Comput Biol Chem. 2018;74:39-48.

Awards and Honours

• 2007 – Member, Board of Studies in Bioinformatics University of Madras, India – Appointed as an academic expert contributing to curriculum development and academic evaluation in Bioinformatics.

• 2008 – OpenDiscovery Bioinformatics Linux Distribution Developed under Dr. Umashankar’s guidance; recognized and cited in EMBNet Journal (EMBL Network) as an integrated bioinformatics platform for molecular modelling and computational biology

• Recognition in Structural Bioinformatics – Human Ghrelin Precursor Model (PDB ID: 1P7X) The theoretical structural model predicted by Dr. Umashankar was featured on the cover page of Volume 77 of Vitamins and Hormones published by Elsevier Academic Press.

Editorial Leadership Roles

• Associate Editor – BMC Bioinformatics (Springer Nature)

• Editorial Member – Frontiers in Bioinformatics (Frontiers Media)

• Editorial Member – Frontiers in Physics (Frontiers Media)

• Guest Editor – Genes (MDPI Publishing)

• 2022 – Bioclues Innovation Research and Development (BIRD) Award Conferred by Bioclues Organization (India’s Bioinformatics Society), affiliated with International Society of Computational Biology (ISCB) and Asia Pacific Bioinformatics Network (ApBionet), for outstanding contributions to functional genomics and bioinformatics.

Research Profiles