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How a hotel-room conversation in 2017 became Bangladesh's first dedicated C. elegans laboratory.
“The idea of establishing Bangladesh's first dedicated C. elegans lab was conceived in a hotel room in the spring of 2017 in Florida, USA.”
2017
Muntasir attended an anthelmintic conference in Florida and shared a hotel room with Dr. Harunur Rashid, a researcher from Australia originally from Bangladesh. Muntasir expressed his interest in introducing C. elegans research in Bangladesh, starting from his hometown of Chittagong.
2018
With the generous help of Prof. Himel Barua (Dept of Microbiology) and Prof. Azizul Islam (Dept of Pharmacology), Muntasir conducted lab demonstrations and lectures at Chittagong Veterinary & Animal Sciences University (CVASU), preparing the first batch of C. elegans researchers in Bangladesh. Around the same time, Prof. Hasanuzzaman Talukder at Bangladesh Agricultural University (BAU) in Mymensingh started the country's second C. elegans culture.
2023
The CVASU team started a project aimed at discovering beneficial biological activities of extracts obtained from medicinal plants. CVASU is now actively developing new extraction protocols suited for high-throughput screening (HTS), revealing many interesting hits and demonstrating the promise C. elegans holds for basic research education and training in Bangladesh.