Protein Homeostasis Lab
Meet the Team
Koyeli Mapa, PhD
Principal Investigator
Associate Professor
Department of Life Sciences
School of Natural Sciences (SNS), Shiv Nadar University.
Member of Board of Reviewing Editors, eLife
https://elifesciences.org/about/people/biochemistry-chemical-biology
Educational Qualifications : -
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IMPRS-LS | International Max Planck Research School for Molecular Life Sciences Doctor of Philosophy - PhDBiochemistry and Molecular Biologysumma cum laude (highest grade) 2005 - 2009
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Medical College and Hospital Kolkata Bachelor of Medicine, Bachelor of Surgery - MBBSGeneral Medicine, Surgery, Gynaecology and Obstetrics, Anatomy, Biochemistry, Physiology, Pathology 1996 - 2002
Work Experience :-
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Associate Professor, Department of Life Sciences, School of Natural Sciences, Shiv Nadar University, Delhi-NCR
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Post doctoral work (DBT IYBA Fellow) CSIR-IGIB June 2010 - May 2015, Delhi, India
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Doctoral student (IMPRS graduate school), Institute of Physiological chemistry, LMU, Munich, Munich, Germany
Mainak Pratim Jha
Graduate Student
MSc- Pondicherry University
PhD thesis topic: Understanding non-canonical roles of Hsp 110 molecular chaperons during proteostatsis stresses.
Awards and Fellowship: ICMR SRF 2020,CSIR SRF 2020, GATE-2015, NET-LS -2013
Born in Malda Town, West Bengal in 1992, I was raised in a nuclear family among the bustling streets of Kolkata. My parents always encouraged me to continue my studies in the field I like till the very end of it that paved the course of my studies and my career. I completed my Bachelor’s in Science degree in Microbiology Honours from Asutosh College, Calcutta University. My undergraduate course exposed me enough to the modern research practices that I could not think anything else except pursuing a career in science! As a result, I got enrolled for Master’s in Biotechnology at Pondicherry University. This program developed my research and analytical skills and fine-tuned my scientific aptitude to be more equipped as a budding scientist. After spending five years in completing my undergraduate and postgraduate education, I figured that I am more than just primed to continue my doctoral research. To address that I got enrolled in the Doctoral program offered by Shiv Nadar University and currently continuing as a 4th year PhD scholar in Dr Koyeli Mapa’s group. Here I work on the functional characterization of the non-canonical functions of the Hsp110/SSE1 molecular chaperone and its association with ER and other cellular organellar cross-talk under normal and stressful conditions that might lead to disease prevalences.
Mudassar Ali
Graduate Student
MSc- Central University, Rajasthan
PhD thesis topic: Understanding sub-mitochondrial compartment specific stress
response pathways during proteotoxic stress in mammalian cells.
Awards and Fellowship: ICMR SRF 2022, GATE- 2018,2019
Since my school days, I found Mitochondrion “the powerhouse of cell” most fascinating organelle of the cell, during my bachelor's and master's studies I got to know that why it is called “The Powerhouse” not just because of ATP synthesis but the versatility of its function. In 2018, I got a chance to work with Dr. Koyeli Mapa, where I was initially working to decipher the role of a conserved cysteine residue in Ssc1, Hsp70 of Saccharomyces cerevisiae. Later in 2019, I got the opportunity to start my PhD thesis work in the same lab. Currently, I am working on a project to delineate the mechanism of the misfolding stress response pathways of mitochondria.
Debanjan kar
Graduate Student
M.Sc. - Coochbehar Panchanan Barma University
Awards and Fellowship: CSIR-JRF 2021, GATE-2021
PhD thesis topic: Elucidation of changes in cellular metabolic profile and modulatory role of VMS1 during mitochondrial stress
Sarbani Bhattacharjee
Graduate Student
M.Sc. -Life Sciences (Biochemistry)
Central University of Punjab
Awards and Fellowship: GATE (BT)-2022
Everything in the universe wants to accomplish homeostasis,very much like the biomolecules in our body and protein being the most complex one tends to maintain the overall stasis. Hello myself Sarbani, I really enjoy decoding the various proteotoxic stresses that might lead to protein degradation in the cell and how the cells finds alternatives to survive.
Anjali
Graduate Student
M.sc - C.C.S University Meerut
Awards and Fellowship – Net LS-2021, 2022
Zoology to Molecular Biology, delving through the world of science. As a graduate in Zoology(H) from university of Delhi, the complexity of what is happening inside a cell and why it happens has always fascinated me. I sometimes look at it as an enclosed society where the molecules are performing their assigned roles within communication, transport, governing, waste management and so on. This interest led me to pursue PhD. I got the opportunity to start my PhD thesis work under Dr koyeli Mapa. Here I am learning about protein homeostasis and various techniques of molecular biology .
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)