ICAR-CIFT scholar joins the 46th Indian Scientific Expedition to Antarctica for work at Maitri

2 November 2026

A research scholar from Kochi is going to Antarctica with India's 46th Indian Scientific Expedition to Antarctica, which sails on 7 November 2026. Athira A. S. works at the ICAR-Central Institute of Fisheries Technology in Kochi and will be stationed at Maitri, India's research station, where her subject is microbial life in the Antarctic land ecosystem. Her work falls under a project named Contaminant Load Evaluation in Antarctic Natural Systems, called CLEAN-ANT for short; the National Centre for Polar and Ocean Research at Goa coordinates it, under the Ministry of Earth Sciences. She will isolate actinomycetes from soil samples and describe how they spread where conditions are extreme. Actinomycetes matter because they yield biologically active natural compounds, and one strand of the study asks whether Antarctic strains give antimicrobial substances. The arrangement joins polar science at the Goa centre to aquatic and environmental microbiology at the Kochi institute.