Karthick Raja ARULPRAKASAM

PhD Student

MSc. Life Sciences | Bharathidasan University, India

About

Karthick is from Tamil Nadu, India. He received his Master's degree from Bharathidasan University. Initially drawn to the field of life sciences, his interest gradually shifted toward bioinformatics as he progressed in his academic journey. During his master's, he pursued an independent project in which he used comparative genomics to identify unique secondary metabolites within the Actinobacteria family. He later explored the proteomics of the rare and unique fungus Psilocybe cubensis. Following the completion of his degree, Karthick briefly worked as a project associate at the Indian Institute of Science, where he studied olfaction in wild isolates of Caenorhabditis elegans in response to different volatile chemicals.

Project

In August 2023, he joined the Thibault Lab as a Ph.D. student and began investigating the role of the unfolded protein response (UPR) in C. elegans during Candida albicans infection. His growing passion for bioinformatics led him to focus on identifying uncharacterized markers of the UPR across various disease contexts—including cancer, neurodegenerative disorders, and bacterial/viral infections—through meta-transcriptomic analysis. Outside the lab, Karthick enjoys playing badminton and exploring new places.

Publications

  1. Kumar MR, Arulprakasam KR, Kutevska A-N, Mutwil M, Thibault G. Yeast Knowledge Graphs Database for Exploring Saccharomyces Cerevisiae and Schizosaccharomyces Pombe. J Mol Biol 2025;437:169072. DOI: 10.1016/j.jmb.2025.169072

  2. Arulprakasam KR, Toh JWS, Foo H, Kumar MR, Kutevska A-N, Davey EE, Mutwil M, Thibault G. Harnessing full-text publications for deep insights into C. elegans and Drosophila biomaps. BMC Genomics 2024;25:1080. DOI: 10.1186/s12864-024-10997-6

  3. Balakrishnan K, Arulprakasam KR, Sivaraj A, Balakrishnan G, Manickam M, and Dharumadurai D. Proteomic analysis of psychedelic mushroom isolate and exploring potential antimicrobial peptides against bacteria. Nat Prod Res 2024;n.d.;0:1–9. DOI: 10.1080/14786419.2024.2423045

  4. Arulprakasam KR, Dharumadurai D. Biosynthetic gene clusters of symbiotic gut microbiome in succession of human health. In: Dharumadurai D, editor. Microb. Symbionts, Academic Press; 2023, p. 847–59. DOI: 10.1016/B978-0-323-99334-0.00007-4

  5. Arulprakasam KR, Dharumadurai D. Assessment of Platelet Aggregation. In: Dwivedi MK, Amaresan N, Sankaranarayanan A, Begum R, editors. Biosaf. Assess. Probiotic Potential, New York, NY: Springer US; 2022, p. 165–70. DOI: 10.1007/978-1-0716-2509-5_18

  6. Arulprakasam KR, Dharumadurai D. Genome mining of biosynthetic gene clusters intended for secondary metabolites conservation in actinobacteria. Microb Pathog 2021;161:105252. DOI: 10.1016/j.micpath.2021.105252