Molecular Biophysics Unit (MBU): Recent submissions
Now showing items 21-40 of 284
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Insights into the conformational stability & pharmacology of peptides through side chain and backbone modification
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 ... -
Homeostasis of cyclic-di-AMP in Mycobacterium smegmatis: Functional and structural contributions of c-di-AMP synthase (MsDisA) and hydrolase (MsPDE)
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 ... -
Mutational sensitivity of CcdB mutants in their native operonic context
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 ... -
Robustness of Neural Activity Dynamics in the Medial Entorhinal Cortex
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 ... -
Mechanistic insights into protein stabilization and protein-protein interactions
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 ... -
Structural, mechanistic and pharmacological studies of inhibitory neurotransmitter transporters
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 ... -
Structural and Biophysical studies to evaluate the influence of oligomerization on biomolecular function
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 ... -
Structural and functional insights of biological macromolecules associated with infectious diseases – single particle cryo-electron microscopy based studies
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 ... -
First thorough characterization of the structure, interactions and specificity of an archeal lectin with implication for TB infection
Decades long studies on plant lectins carried out in this laboratory have contributed substantially to glycobiology and helped in the initiation and development of macromolecular crystallography in India. Subsequently the ... -
Probing Protein Sequence-Function Relationships using Deep Mutational Scanning
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 ... -
Exploring Nature's Inventory: Investigating the Role of Amide to Thioamide Substitution on Protein Stability
The peptide backbone holds a protein together and plays a crucial role in guiding its three-dimentional structure. The tertiary structure of proteins regulates several biological processes. Therefore, peptide bond modification ... -
Identification, characterization, structure, and assembly of type III toxin-antitoxin systems from Escherichia coli
Bacteria adopt several defense strategies to enable their survival against the environmental threats they encounter from time to time. Toxin-antitoxin (TA) systems are being understood as a key bacterial defense mechanism ... -
Integrative modeling of NS3 helicase function with molecular kinetics, molecular simulations and machine learning
The viral NS3 helicase is a crucial enzyme involved in the RNA replication of positive strand ssRNA viruses of the Flaviviridae family. The NS3 is an active motor that binds RNA and couples ATP hydrolysis to the mechanical ... -
HIV-1 and SARS-CoV-2 immunogen design
Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV-1) is the aetiologic agent of AIDS. Presently there are ~38 million HIV-1 infected individuals worldwide and ~1 million deaths in 2019. Since its discovery, the quest for vaccine candidate ... -
Development of quantitative RNA sequencing methods to understand RNA variant diversity.
The advent of next-generation sequencing (NGS) has accelerated biological research by providing the opportunity to connect genome level sequence information to function. One key application of NGS has been analysis of gene ... -
Protein-small molecule interactions: Structural insights and applications in computational drug discovery
Deviation from normal healthy conditions, termed as disease, can often be triggered due to the malfunctioning of proteins. Modulating the functions of proteins by administering therapeutic agents (drugs) may alleviate the ... -
Influence of the substrate specificity of Mycobacterium tuberculosis ClpX on the transcriptional profile
Cellular homeostasis in bacteria is maintained by diverse molecular machines. These include several one-component systems (OCS), two- component systems (TCS), chaperone proteins, proteases, proteolytic complexes and ... -
Stimulus statistics and HCN current mediated resonance sets the scale of input-output mapping in Stellate cells of the Medial Entorhinal Cortex
The functional significance of the computations performed by Stellate cells of the Medial Entorhinal Cortex, proven time and again, makes them insightful, yet intriguing. The gradients of the intrinsic properties of these ... -
Multi-faceted modular interactions in proteins
All living systems are composed of plethora of biomolecules. There are various types of biomolecules such as proteins, DNA, RNA, carbohydrates and metabolites. All the reactions in a biological system involve interactions ... -
Cholinergic-receptor-independent modulation of intrinsic properties of subicular neurons through inhibition of hyperpolarization-activated cyclic nucleotide-gated channels
Acetylcholine release is vital in tuning the hippocampal theta oscillations. Subiculum, the output region of the hippocampus endowed with different neuronal subtypes, also generates theta oscillations during arousal and ...