Macromolecular interactions are essential for different cellular processes in all forms of life, underpinning wide array of biological functions. Structural genomics reveals new molecular complexes with unknown functions. Thus it creates a challenge to computational structural biologists to understand the folding, assembly, evolution, and function of these cellular machines that are governed by the specific interactions of macromolecules. My research aims to elucidate the question ?What makes the specificity in macromolecular recognition?, especially protein-RNA recognition. Our Computational Structural Biology Lab try to address many fundamental questions like ?how to discriminate the specific and non-specific interactions, ?what is the role of water molecules in protein-RNA recognition?, ?how protein interaction networks in icosahedral virus capsids assemble to make a spherical like structure that encapsulate and protect viral genome? and ?what makes the specificity of proteins to interact with nucleic acids?. We are also interested to understand the structural basis of energetics of folding and binding of RNA with protein. This will contribute knowledge to our understanding of the intrinsically disordered proteins, which undergoes unfolding to folding transition while binding a RNA molecule. Besides, we are developing algorithms for the prediction of miRNA and lncRNA in different plant species. Study of these complex assemblies is not only important for their functional role but also they serve as major therapeutic targets, and such a study should be relevant to both basic science and pharmacology.
All Publications
All Publication Details
Principal Investigator
Structural Modeling of RNA Binding Proteins and their Assembly in Human Proteome Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, Extramural Research Division
Completed Projects
Completed Projects Details
Ph.D. Students
Smita Priyadarshini Pilla Area of Research: Structural Bioinformatics of macromolecular assemblies
Sushmita Basu Area of Research: Computational Structural Biology
Ankita Agarwal Area of Research: Computational Biology
Moumita Roy Chowdhury Area of Research: Computational Biology
Alagar S Area of Research: Bioinformatics and Computational Biology
Shri Kant Area of Research: Computational Biology
Swarnadip Mitra Area of Research: Bioinformatics and Computational Biology
Sumana Banerjee Area of Research: Biophysics and Computational Biology
