Protein Homeostasis Lab
Meet the Team
Bhoopesh Maheswaran
Final Year Thesis Student
Kashish Dahiya
Final Year Thesis Student
Karthik Ravi
Opportunities for Undergraduate Research Program (OUR)
Alumni
Graduate Student
Rajasri Sarkar
Graduated in 2023
Current Affiliation- School of Medicine
Yale University
Bio sketch - Almost a century ago, modern science made a huge leap of progress in exploring what happens inside the cell, how the organelles coordinate within itself in it to make it functional. During my M.SC days I had a keen interest to find out how cells manage to wake up every morning and do a ton of job, thus how I took interest in the organelle mitochondria, the powerhouse of cell and learn how does this interesting organelle contributes to cell functionality. As I got enrolled in my PhD studies, I choose to work under Dr. Koyeli Mapa . Here I got extensive training in techniques like RDT and protein biology, organelle isolation, Animal cell culture, microscopy etc. My work includes understanding of Sub compartment specific mitochondrial misfolding stress response. I investigate how the tom complex imparts its role during protein misfolding stress in different compartments of mitochondria.
Kannan BN
Graduated in 2021
Current Affiliation- Wake Forest School
of Medicine, North Carolina, USA
Bio sketch - I, Kannan BN, Graduated
in 2021 from CSIR-IGIB. After
completion of my masters in
Biochemical technology from Periyar University, Tamilnadu. I worked as a project assistant at the Department of Microbiology and Cell Biology, IISc, Bangalore and learned basic molecular biology and yeast genetics. I am very much interested in elucidation of mitochondrial sub-compartment specific misfolded protein stress response by using yeast (Saccharomyces cerevisiae) as a model system. By using various molecular biology, yeast genetics techniques, and RNA sequencing, biochemical experiments, we are trying to find out the basic molecular mechanism of unfolded protein response in mitochondrial sub-compartments like inter-membrane space (IMS) and matrix. Since yeast is a simple lower eukaryotic microorganism, studying this would pave the way to understand the molecular mechanism in higher organisms like the mammalian system in both physiological and disease condition.
Anwar Sadat
Graduated in 2021
Current Affiliation- University of Geneva,
Switzerland
Bio sketch -
My project is to understand the molecular mechanism of chaperonin assisted protein folding. Understanding the molecular mechanism of protein folding is crucial for improving cellular protein folding capacity. All organisms have elaborate machineries to achieve and maintain the functional states of its proteins within crowded intra-cellular milieu. Molecular chaperones are key components of the protein quality control machineries. Bacterial barrel-shaped chaperone or chaperonin, GroEL/ES are homologous to eukaryotic Hsp60/10 system which are essential for folding of many proteins and for cell viability. Towards understanding the underlying mechanism of chaperonin-assisted protein folding, we employed a slow folding mutant of YeGFP (named as sGFP) and by following the chaperonin-assisted refolding of sGFP, we found that bacterial GroEL/ES actively alters the folding pathway of sGFP while the eukaryotic chaperonins assist in refolding of sGFP mostly by preventing its aggregation. The cavity surface of these various chaperonin molecules are different from each other. We propose that GroEL/ES is efficient folding machinery for many substrate proteins due to unique property of its cavity surface. We hypothesize that molecular mechanism of chaperonins has significantly diverged from prokaryotes to eukaryotes tocater to specific substrate pool.
Satyam Tiwari
Graduated in 2017
Current Affiliation- Scientist at
Faculty of Biology and
Medicine (FBM) University of Lausanne.
Bio sketch -
For my Ph.D., I studied a group of proteins called "Molecular Chaperones.” Broadly, my Ph.D. research aimed to understand how E.coli/Yeast and Human chaperone networks collaborate in nascent polypeptide chain folding. One of the central questions I asked in my Ph.D. thesis is to investigate the mechanism of ATP-fueled chaperones (Hsp60/10 and Hsp70/40) in in-depth details, e.g., if they prevent protein aggregation only? Or if they have the potential to resolve misfolding/non-native contacts? Or do they actively accelerate the rate of spontaneous folding? We have shown the role of folding intermediates in chaperone-substrate recognition. Then we show, E. coli Hsp40-DanJ, is not only a co-chaperone of DnaK but also can modulate the structures of client protein. While working on E.coli/Yeast and Human Hsp60/10 system, we have shown the importance of cavity charges in the folding assistance given by GroEL/ES and its Yeast and Human homologs.
Vignesh Kumar
Graduated in 2017
Current Affiliation-
Assistant Professor,
Department of Biotechnology,
PSG Colllege of Technology
Bio sketch - My primary interest is in protein homeostasis. The highly conserved and ubiquitous molecular chaperone HSP70 is very essential for maintaining cellular protein homeostasis. Cellular
functions of Hsp110s are poorly characterized, but biochemical analyses suggest that Hsp110s
may be the principal NEFs for cytosolic Hsp70s. In particular, it was shown that Sse1 is a potent
NEF for yeast Hsp70s Ssa1 and Ssa2. It is also found that synergistic effects of Hsp110 and
cochaperones on Hsp70 refolding activity. The structural similarity of Hsp110 with Hsp70
chaperones and particularly the existence of a putative substrate-binding domain are puzzling
because none of the known NEFs possesses nucleotide binding or substrate-binding domains.
Even though the NEF of HSP110 is well defined, the role of HSP110 in proteostasis is still
obscure.
Undergraduate Thesis Student
Shruti Tyagi
Batch (2022-23)
Current Affiliation- Product Evaluation Software Tester Product Evaluation Software Tester
Thermo Fisher Scientific
Aman Shah
Batch (2022-23)
Current Affiliation- Incoming Graduate Student at the Johns Hopkins University
Swati Sharma
Batch (2021-22)
Current Affiliation- POSTBACCALAUREATE PROGRAMS AT THE NIH, USA
Khushi Garg
Batch (2021-22)
Current Affiliation- KJ Somaiya Institute of Management '25 (MBA)
Shraddha Krishnakumar
Batch (2020-21)
Current Affiliation- Master's Student, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, USA
Shrihari Negi
Batch (2019-20)
Current Affiliation- Graduate Student, CEPLAS - Cluster of Excellence on Plant Sciences, Düsseldorf, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany
Jyotirmoy Rajurkar
Batch (2020-21)
Current Affiliation- Master's Student , LMU, Munich, Germany
Rutuparnna Mishra
Batch (2019-20)
Current Affiliation- Graduate Teaching Assistant ,University of Central Florida, Orlando, Florida, USA
Surabhi Oberoi
Batch (2019-20)
Current Affiliation- Associate Analyst, DelveInsight Business Research LLP, New Delhi, India
Adithi Thangaraju
Batch (2017-18)
Current Affiliation- Senior Biologist, Eli Lilly and Company,San Diego, California,USA
Akanksha Awasthi
Batch (2018-19)
Current Affiliation- M.A Development , Azim Premji University, Bengaluru,Karnataka,India
Post Doctoral Fellow
Priyanka Majumder (SERB-NPDF)
Current Affiliation-Program Associate-BIG at Society for Innovation & Entrepreneurship -SINE IIT Bombay
Junior Reserach Fellow
Saswata Chakrabarty
Current Affiliation- PhD, Indian Institute of Technology, Guwahati, India
Akshita Upreti
Current Affiliation- PhD, BITS Pilani Goa
Sarada Das
Current Affiliation-PhD , University of Hamburg , Germany
Jyoti Verma
Current Affiliation- ONGC, India
Joel Fernandes
Current Affiliation-PhD ,Max Plant Institute of Plant Breeding Research, Cologne, Germany
Opportunities for Undergraduate Research (OUR) Program by Shiv Nadar University
Shruti Tyagi (2021-22)
Swati Sharma (2019-20)
Srihari Negi (2018-19)
Anindita Puri (2017-18)
Chaitra Shree (2016-17)
Apoorv Srivastava (2016-2017)