Vijay Selvam

Research Assistant II

Investigating the genes and genetic variants involved in various mechanisms of Type II Diabetes leading to Islet beta cell dysfunction and loss.

Type II Diabetes is a complex Polygenic disorders which can be initiated by different stressors such as Inflammation, ER-stress, Oxidative stress. The genetic variations leading to T2D are mostly in the non-coding region, the genes which they impact and their phenotypic effects under cellular stressors are unknown. My research mainly focuses on using RNAi such as shRNA, CRISPRi to study the phenotypic effect of the gene knockdown under different cellular stressors in beta cell line model and primary human islets, and also the transcription factor binding alternation in the genetic variants linked to the genes.