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Niraj Bhatt is a graduate student at CSIR-IGIB in New Delhi. He has been an active member of the F1000 Specialists programme since early 2014, and in this interview he shares some advice for other Specialists and talks about his research. This is a longer version of an interview that was included in this month’s newsletter for F1000 Specialists.

What have you been doing to tell your colleagues about F1000?

Personal experience for me matters the most, and I keep that in mind while talking to my colleagues about F1000. I have been talking about my experience using F1000Prime’s Journal Club and Smart Search and about F1000Workspace, as these are the services of F1000 that I use the most.

I have also extensively talked about F1000Posters, now part of F1000Research, and that has pleasantly surprised most of my colleagues. A few expressed doubts about data privacy, ownership issues of the poster deposited, etc. [Editor’s note: You retain copyright of any posters you upload to F1000Research.] I answer their queries and encourage them to use the service and experience the perks of it themselves.

The personalization that F1000 services offer is one aspect I emphasize the most in my informal interaction with my colleagues. I keep my colleagues informed about F1000 using our institutional mailing system, and take to Twitter and Facebook for larger reach.

Do you have any tips for new F1000 Specialists?

One thing that I believe and strongly recommend for new F1000 Specialists to follow is to make sure that you don”t sound like a marketing agent for F1000 because that’s not what being an F1000 Specialist means. Our colleagues would appreciate genuine efforts of popularizing open science and transparent publishing.

I would suggest new specialists to first use various F1000 services themselves and then talk in detail to your colleagues only about those services and for other services, take help from our outreach team at F1000 who are always there for help.

What are you working on in your research at the moment?

One of the primary research interests of our lab is stress responsive communication network in endoplasmic reticulum(ER) of vertebrates. I am using AR42J cells to study the tolerance/sensitivity of Unfolded Protein Response of the ER (UPR-ER), using model proteins that induce UPR-ER. The long-term goal of this project is to study the change in UPR-ER amplitude with age in a vertebrate model.

Another main aspect and the current focus of my study is to elucidate the role of UPR-ER in the pathogenesis of acute pancreatitis, where I am trying to identify the molecular mechanisms involved in the final manifestation of the pancreatitis at the cellular level and involving UPR-ER, autophagy, necrosis and apoptosis.

I am also exploring the therapeutic potential of bioactive small molecules and chemical chaperones in alleviating the pancreatitis. In another project, we have made a transgenic zebrafish line expressing roGFP targeted to ER (eroGFP) under a constitutive promoter. These eroGFP fishes are a useful tool for the scientific community to look at the involvement of ER redox stress/perturbations in various diseases where ER dysfunction or UPR is involved, and for high-throughput drug screens in such diseases.