I am from Nepal and I did BSc. in Biotechnology  during which I did my intern in the Department of Plant resources, Government of Nepal. During my short stay as an intern there, I did the  in vitro study of Tinospora cordifolia (Willd.) Miers (Menispermaceae) and many other medicinal plants.

I moved to Bern in 2011, when I received the Master’s Grant from the University of Bern to study Master’s in Molecular Life Sciences. I studied the role of histone modifications in the small RNA guided DNA elimination in Paramecium during my masters. We were able to show that the histone modifications are required for the elimination of IESs. The whole complexity of IES recognition and its precise excision was quite intriguing for me and I was very interested to understand the mechanism behind. Hence, I continued to study the mechanism in my PhD as well.

During the last fours years of my PhD, I have been focusing on the role of nucleosome positioning around an IES. The gene of my interest is an ISWI protein containing C-terminal SLIDE domain and we are trying to understand if this protein is required to make the boundaries of an IESs available for the domesticated transposase, PiggyMac, for their excision.

Publications from the Nowacki lab:

• Ignarski, Michael; Singh, Aditi; Swart, Estienne Carl; Arambasic, Miroslav; Sandoval, Pamela Yohanna de Lourdes; Nowacki, Mariusz (2014). Paramecium tetraurelia chromatin assembly factor-1-like protein PtCAF-1 is involved in RNA-mediated control of DNA elimination. Nucleic acids research, 42(19), pp. 11952-11964. Information Retrieval Ltd.

• Arambasic, Miroslav; Sandoval, Pamela Yohanna de Lourdes; Höhener, Cristina; Singh, Aditi; Swart, Estienne Carl; Nowacki, Mariusz (2014). Pdsg1 and Pdsg2, novel proteins involved in developmental genome remodelling in Paramecium. PLoS ONE, 9(11), e112899. Public Library of Science