Research Interests
 

"Certainly no subject or field is making more progress on so many fronts at the present moment than biology, and if we were to name the most powerful assumption of all, which leads one on and on in an attempt to understand life, it is that all things are made of atoms, and that everything that living things do can be understood in terms of the jigglings and wigglings of atoms"

--- Richard P. Feynman.

 

G-Protein Coupled Receptors (GPCRs) and protein kinases are crucial drug targets, evolved to regulate their activity through allosteric mechanism. Currently, we are focused on understanding the allosteric activation and deactivation mechanism of class A and class B GPCRs as well as kinases.

 

Small GTPase are the family of hydrolases that are essential for cell proliferation, dynamics of the cytoskeleton, membrane trafficking and nucleo-cytoplasmic transport. We are trying to decode the catalytic mechanism of these enzymes.

 

Environmentally benign green-solvent, room temperature ionic liquids (RTILs) have wide applications as solvents and preservatives of biomolecules. With regard to their influence on biomolecules, RTILs have been proven to have a strong impact on biocatalytic activity and structural stability. At present, we are investigating the molecular mechanism of solvation energetics and dynamics of biomolecules in RTILs and their mixtures with various polar and non-polar solvents.

 

Many eukaryotic proteins are natively disordered and play vital biological functions implicated in cell signalling and disease. They adopts well-defined tertiary structures only upon binding to their partner molecules. Our goal is to characterize the structure and dynamics of intrinsically disordered peptides invloved in neurological disorders.