Selva Rupa Christinal Immanuel

Research Scientist

401 Terry Ave N
206-732-1258
rupa.immanuel@isbscience.org

Dr. Immanuel is a Research Scientist at the Institute for Systems Biology. She earned her Ph.D. in Biological sciences from the Academy of Scientific and Innovative Research (AcSIR), CSIR-National Chemical Laboratory, India. She holds a Masters degree in Nanoscience and Nanotechnology, and a Bachelor’s degree in Biotechnology. She was awarded gold medal for securing first rank in her MTech., at the University of Madras, Chennai, India, and won the DST-INSPIRE fellowship from Government of India for her Ph.D. She was also an awardee of the prestigious Newton Bhabha Fund for the year 2014 - 2015 to conduct short-term research at the Manchester Institute of Biotechnology, University of Manchester, UK.

At Baliga lab, Dr. Immanuel’s research focuses on developing new computational and experimental strategies to predict condition-specific phenotypes for the identification of drug targets and drug combinations against infectious diseases and cancers. Dr. Immanuel’s research employs a holistic approach that incorporates different multi-omics datasets. Her broader research scope is to innovate a scalable framework for network-driven drug discovery and translation of foundational concepts from the lab to clinical applications.

Dr. Immanuel has led the development of a new predictive model, PRIME – that can identify environment-specific vulnerabilities within the regulatory and metabolic networks of the pathogen, Mycobacterium tuberculosis (Mtb). PRIME has been implemented in other systems like C. difficile to uncover how combinatorial gene regulation modulates essential metabolic processes. Because of its versatility, PRIME has also been applied to study microbial communities, Desulfovibrio vulgaris (DvH) and Methanococcus maripaludis S2 (Mmp) to understand cellular dynamics in fluctuating environments. Her research also focuses on integrating host and pathogen genome-scale networks to identify host-specific regulation of key processes. Currently, she is also expanding the scope of PRIME to delineate the mode of action of new drugs with unknown mechanisms.

Publications

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Srinivas V, Ruiz RA, Pan M, Immanuel SRC, Peterson EJR, Baliga NS. Transcriptome signature of cell viability predicts drug response and drug interaction in Mycobacterium tuberculosis. Cell Rep Methods. 2021 Dec 20;1(8):None.
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Arrieta-Ortiz ML, Immanuel SRC, Turkarslan S, Wu WJ, Girinathan BP, Worley JN, et al. Predictive regulatory and metabolic network models for systems analysis of Clostridioides difficile. Cell Host Microbe. 2021 Nov 10;29(11):1709-1723.e5.
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Immanuel SRC, Arrieta-Ortiz ML, Ruiz RA, Pan M, Lopez Garcia de Lomana A, Peterson EJR, et al. Quantitative prediction of conditional vulnerabilities in regulatory and metabolic networks using PRIME. NPJ Syst Biol Appl. 2021 Dec 6;7(1):43.
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Azer K, Kaddi CD, Barrett JS, Bai JPF, McQuade ST, Merrill NJ, et al. History and Future Perspectives on the Discipline of Quantitative Systems Pharmacology Modeling and Its Applications. Front Physiol. 2021;12:637999.
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Girinathan BP, DiBenedetto N, Worley JN, Peltier J, Arrieta-Ortiz ML, Immanuel SRC, et al. In vivo commensal control of Clostridioides difficile virulence. Cell Host Microbe. 2021 Nov 10;29(11):1693-1708.e7.
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Pavao A, Graham M, Arrieta-Ortiz ML, Immanuel SRC, Baliga NS, Bry L. Reconsidering the in vivo functions of Clostridial Stickland amino acid fermentations. Anaerobe. 2022 Aug;76:102600.