Research Summary

What do we work on?

Like any other structural biology laboratory, we also work primarily on proteins. If you ask what proteins we work on, we would answer that we work on proteins from viruses, bacteria, yeast, plants, and animals (including humans). Yeah! All of it actually and DNA as well. However, it is not the source we are particularly interested in; it is their function that we try to address through structural studies. In our pursuit to 'solve' structural problems on a particular theme, we take up proteins from varying sources.

What kind of experiments do we often do?

Routine experiments in our laboratory include PCR, cloning, protein over-expression, protein purification, biochemical, biophysical, and functional characterization, crystallization, and structure solution. As a structural biology group, our major tool has been crystallography and, more recently, cryo-EM too! We do quite an amount of SAXS and AUC as well.

What is our major interest?

Chromatin structural biology has been our mainstay, wherein we focus on histone chaperones and certain other chromatin-associated factors. Among histone chaperones, our interest has been in nucleoplasmins and NAP family proteins. We also pursue several projects around the theme of pathogen biology.