Dr. Ashok Kumar Madikonda holds a Bachelor of Science (B.Sc) from Osmania University, Hyderabad and a Master of Science (M. Sc) from Allahabad Agricultural Institute (AAI-DU), Allahabad. After attaining the CSIR-JRF qualification, he joined the School of Life Sciences, University of Hyderabad. He completed his Ph.D. under the supervision of Prof. S Dayananda, a distinguished professor in the field of Molecular Biology. Due to his interest in RNA biology, he joined the laboratory of Dr. Sue Lin Chao, a distinguished researcher in the fields of RNA biology and neurobiology at the Institute of Molecular Biology (IMB), Academia Sinica as a postdoctoral fellow, Taipei, Taiwan's premier scientific research institution.

In his doctoral studies, Dr. Ashok worked on the molecular mechanisms underlaying the biomineralization of p-nitrophenol by heterologous expressed esterase. In this work, he showed E.coli exhibits metabolic shift from conventional catabolism to alternate catabolism upon overexpression of  the esterase.  Further, he has demonstrated the upregulation of operons involved in alternative carbon catabolism, hca (phenylpropionate) and mhp (hydroxyphenylpropionate) degradation. In addition, he identified the propionate is the key molecule that is produced due to the action of esterase. Furthermore, he demonstrated that propionate  alone can induce the hca (phenylpropionate) and mhp (hydroxyphenyl propionate) degradation operons. He also demonstrated esterase-dependent assimilation of PNP and incorporated in to RNA using 14C-labeled PNP. This work was published in journal of Biological chemistry (JBC), a premier journal published by American Society for Biochemistry and Microbiology. Due to these contributions, he shares equal first authorship with his predecessors at JBC.  

After identifying the existence of metabolic remodelling in Escherichia coli MG1655 cells expressing the esterase Orf306. He later hypothesized and demonstrated esterase-dependent metabolic remodelling is due to regulation of a novel small RNA (sRNA), co293. In this work, he also identified that overexpression of esterase lead to differential expression of sRNAs and noncoding RNAs. The studies on the small RNAs, revealed that sRNA c0293  was repressed due to esterase actions. Intriguingly, the repressed small RNA shown interactions with the upregulated hca operon transcriptional regulator hcaR. He proved the interactions between repressed small RNA and hacR mRNA using translation fusion assays. Also proved that the indigenous propionate generated due to esterase/lipase actions can induce hcaR expression and at the same time downregulate small RNA, co293. This study gives complete picture of molecular mechanism underlying esterase/Lipase mediated biomineralization of PNP. The data was published in the journal ‘The FEBS journal’ with Dr. Ashok as lead author.