Sanjay Swarup
Associate Professor, Department of Biological Sciences
Faculty of Science
Deputy Director, NUS Environmental Research Institute (NERI)
Tel: +65 6516 7933
Email: dbsss@nus.edu.sg

What are your present research interests?

My research interests lie largely in understanding the biological role of metabolites in cellular networks, including their modularity, connectivity and control mechanisms. Our research group is also interested in studying the functional ecology of microbial communities, or microbiomes, in various environment contexts.

What do you see as your future research directions?

We aim to further strengthen our capabilities to comprehensively map out changes in the ‘metabolome’ of cells in response to perturbations such as metabolic mutations, effector molecules, or environment stresses. Understanding cellular responses in different biological pathways will have useful applications in biomedical sciences and environment studies.

Does your laboratory have a particularly strong research expertise?

With access to multiple hardware platforms as well as custom software pipelines for data extraction and processing, our laboratory has developed strong expertise in metabolomics. Using multi-‘omics’ approaches, we have the ability to study diverse metabolic networks in a variety of model and non-model organisms.

Recent Publications

1. Balan P, Chong YS, Umashankar S, Swarup S*, Loke WM, Lopez V, He HG and Seneviratne CJ (2018) Keystone Species in Pregnancy Gingivitis: A Snapshot of Oral Microbiome During Pregnancy and Postpartum Period, Frontiers in Microbiology, 9:2360.
2. Saxena G, Mitra S, Marzinelli EM, Xie C, Wei TJ, Steinberg PD, Williams RBH, Kjelleberg S, Lauro FM, Swarup S* (2018) Metagenomics Reveals the Influence of Land Use and Rain on the Benthic Microbial Communities in a Tropical Urban Waterway. mSystems, 3: e00136-17.
3. Teh BT, Lim K, Yong CH, Ng CCY, Rao SR, Rajasegaran V, Lim WK, Ong CK, Chan K, Cheng VKY, Soh PS, Swarup S*, Rozen SG, Nagarajan N, Tan P (2017). The draft genome of tropical fruit durian (Durio zibethinus). Nature Genetics, 49: 1633-1641.
4. Saxena G, Marzinelli EM, Naing NN, He Z, Liang Y, Tom L, Ping H, Josh, UM, Reuben S, Mynampati KC, Mishra S, Umashankar S, Mitra S, Zhou J, Andersen G, Kjelleberg S, and Swarup S* (2015). Ecogenomics reveals metals and land-use pressures on microbial communities in the waterways of a megacity. Environmental Science & Technology 49: 1462–1471.