Banaras Hindu University, visualized and established by the great visionary Pandit Madan Mohan Malaviyaji in 1916 at Varanasi, the cultural capital of India, is an iconic academic institution for higher learning.
• BHU is nationally and internationally recognized not only for its large green residential campus and teaching of a very wide diversity of subjects from under-graduate to post-graduate and doctoral levels, but also for the quality of research output by its faculty.
• BHU’s Department of Zoology, established in 1921, is one of the best in the country for studies in various sub-disciplines of animal sciences. This department’s academic outlook was transformed when Prof. S. P. Ray-Chaudhuri, trained by the Nobel laureate Prof. H. J. Muller in radiation genetics using the fruit fly Drosophila, joined the department as Professor and Head in 1961. He introduced subjects like Genetics and Biochemistry as part of Zoology curriculum and also strengthened areas like Endocrinology, Entomology, Fish Biology etc as part of modernization.
• The world renowned Cytogenetics laboratory of the Department of Zoology was established in the early 1960s by Professor S. P. Ray-Chaudhuri with the help of Prof. T. Sharma, his student and later a colleague.
• Faculty members of this lab offer regularly updated courses in Genetics, Cytogenetics, Evolution, Developmental Genetics etc to under- and post-graduate students of the department of Zoology. It also offers a highly sought after major elective in Molecular and Human Genetics as part of the M.Sc. curriculum in Zoology.
• The research areas that have been examined in Cytogenetics lab include evolution of katyotypes, sex-chromosomes and heterochromatin in various Indian mammals, birds, snakes, lizard and Drosophila species, effects of ionizing radiations and chemicals on chromosomes (in cultured blood cells of human and the Indian Muntjak), organization of active replicons in vertebrate and Drosophila chromosomes, methylation and gene expression during development in mouse and lizard models, identification and characterization of genes involved in human cardiomyopathies, cell-stress induced gene expression in Drosophila, hsr-omega non-coding RNA gene in Drosophila, patterns of expression of some genes with key regulatory roles in development in Drosophila, mechanisms of actions of Ayurvedic formulations using the fly model.
• Five of its former and present faculty members, Prof. S. P. Ray-Chaudhuri, Prof. T. Sharma, Prof. S. C. Lakhotia, Prof. R. Raman, Prof. B. N. Singh, have been elected fellows of some or all of the different Science Academies in India. One of them, Prof. S. C. Lakhotia, received the Shanti Swaroop Bhatnagar Prize, highest prize for science in India by government of india. Two of the faculty members, Prof. S. C. Lakhotia and Dr. Devanjan Sinha were also awarded the Young Scientist Medal by the Indian National Science Academy. Dr. Richa Arya and Dr. Brahma Charan Mondal also received Ramalingaswamy fellowship.
• Keeping in view this group’s outstanding studies using high quality microscopy and its future needs, the Department of Science & Technology installed the first Multiphoton Confocal microscope in India in 2000 at this laboratory.
• Faculty of the Cytogenetics laboratory took the initiative to start a new Master’s programme in Molecular & Human Genetics in 1999 which received immediate international attention and led to the establishment of a new department of Molecular & Human Genetics at BHU in 2004.
• Recognizing this lab’s significant expertise and contributions in Human genetics, the Department of Biotechnology provided generous funds for establishing an independent Centre for Genetic Disorders that provides chromosomal and molecular diagnosis for inherited disorders.
• Faculty of the Cytogenetics laboratory also played a significant role in the establishing the DBT-BHU Interdisciplinary School of Life Sciences at BHU.
A unique feature of Cytogenetics Laboratory of the Department of Zoology is its openness, where all the research students (about 25 at any given time) working under different faculty members (varying between 6-10) share common intellectual environment and physical lab space. All its facilities are common and are used by all researchers without any restrictions.
• As a consequence of this openness, all the past and present Master’s and PhD students of the Cytogenetics lab call their assemblage the “Cyto-Gharana”, in the old tradition of the “guru-shishya paramapara”. The alumni, who are spread across the globe and have done excellently in their academic careers, agree that the unique academic and working environment in the Cytogenetics lab gave them freedom to think, discuss, implement, disagree, criticize, and inculcated the scientific temper to evaluate results dispassionately. Their success has made the Cytogenetics lab of BHU world famous.
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