Most amino acid substitutions in a protein either lead to partial loss of function or are near neutral. Several studies have shown the existence of second-site mutations that can rescue the defects caused by diverse loss ...

Deep Mutational Scanning (DMS) approaches help elucidate sequence-function-phenotype relationships in proteins, which ultimately improves our understanding of residue (or nucleotide)-specific contributions to protein ...

In the global context, particularly in India, the two most important infectious diseases among many others are Tuberculosis (TB), an age-old disease and COVID-19, a new-age disease. This thesis focuses on some of the key ...

Gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA) is the major inhibitory neurotransmitter in the central nervous system (CNS). The synaptic levels of GABA are controlled by the activity of GABA transporters (GATs) present in the presynaptic ...

Oligomeric proteins are more common than monomers. This aspect of molecular evolution substantially contributes to functional diversity and the acquisition of features such as cooperativity and regulatory mechanisms. Not ...

In bacteria, cyclic-di-nucleotide based second messengers regulate various physiological processes including the stress response. For the past decades, cyclic diadenosine monophosphate (c-di-AMP) has emerged as a crucial ...

In the last few decades, bacterial Toxin-antitoxin (TA) systems have been identified to play crucial roles in bacterial survival under stressful conditions and virulence. TA systems are pair of genetic elements where one ...

Determining the precise effects of thousands of point mutants on protein structure, stability, and activity is a challenging task. Chapter 1 introduces how next-generation sequencing technologies exploit phenotypic screens ...

Biological systems exhibit considerable heterogeneity in their constitutive components and encounter stochasticity across all scales of analysis. Therefore, central questions that span all biological systems are: (a) How ...

The first part of the work presented in the thesis deals with CH-pi interaction, which is a lesser-known non-covalent interaction in proteins. We identified several CH-pi donor-acceptor pairs involving amino acids side ...