Sites - India
Indian Insitute of Technology - Kharagpur
Institute:
The Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) was established in 1951, with the first IIT campus at Kharagpur. IIT Kharagpur is consistently ranked as one of the best engineering colleges in India. The MH/GH Program collaboration will link primarily with the faculty of the Department of Biotechnology. Department laboratories are equipped for spectrophotometry, ELISA, fluorescent microscopy, DNA fingerprinting/sequencing, fermentation, FPLC and GC, protein electrophoreisis, cell culture, PCR, cloning, and other modern molecular and cell biology techniques. For advanced computing, including structural and functional studies of M. tuberculosis pathogenic proteins, the department provides access to Silicon Graphics workstations.
Host Investigators:
Dr. Satyahari Dey is a Professor in the Department of Biotechnology, IIT Kharagpur, where he served from its inception and as its Head of the Department from 2003 to 2006. He is currently also the Principal Investigator for the Biotech Park at Kharagpur, a joint initiative with the Government of India’s Department of Biotechnology, West Bengal Government and IIT Kharagpur. Prof. Dey has published extensively in journals such as Transgenic Research, Indian Journal of Biotechnology, Process Biochemistry, Biotechnology Letters etc. His current research interests include Molecular farming and bio-prospecting/metabolic profiling & engineering. In 2002 the Government of India recognized Prof. Dey with Technology Day Invention Award. He received his M.Tech and Ph.D. from IIT Kharagpur.
Dr. Amit Kumar Das is a Professor in the Department of Biotechnology, IIT Kharagpur. His main focus of interest is structural biology of pathogenic proteins from organisms like M. tuberculosis and S. aureus through X-ray crystallography methods, Mass spectrometry. He has published his works in reputed journals such as J Biol. Chem., proteins, J. Bact, FEBS Lett, EMBO J, Cell etc. He has been the PI of many projects funded by Government of India, Indo-Norwegian Institutional Collaboration, Indo-German bilateral cooperation etc. Dr. Das received his M.Sc in Chemistry from the Calcutta University in 1987 and his Ph.D. in Crystallography in 1995 from Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics, Calcutta University.
UC Berkeley Collaborators:
Dr. Thomas C. Alber is a Professor of Molecular and Cellular Biology and a member of the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab (LBNL) division of physical biosciences. He also directs the UC Berkeley Center for Emerging and Neglected Diseases. The Alber group studies the general areas of protein dynamics, signaling in tuberculosis and host interactions of HIV. Recent undergraduate students in the Alber lab have studied the signals received by M. tuberculosis protein kinases, crystallized a terpene cyclase that makes a signaling lipid essential for TB, determined the crystal structure f an essential phosphatase from Staph. aureus, mapped the domains of the human partners of HIV Nef protein, and carried out a genetic selection for mutants of an enzyme that simultaneously restore function and protein motions. Techniques employed routinely range from basic molecular biology, biophysics and biochemistry, X-ray crystallography, computational analysis of proteins and genetic studies of M. tuberculosis and host systems. The trainees will gain exposure to a technically comprehensive and rigorous molecular approach to the general problems of pathogen and host signaling mechanisms.
Dr. Kimmen Sjölander is an Associate Professor of Bioengineering, Affiliated Professor of Plant and Microbial Biology, and faculty scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Her group develops novel computational methods and phylogenetic tools to predict pathogen protein structure and function from genomic data. For example, Dr. Sjölander has been funded by NIH and NSF to build and expand PhyloFacts, an online "protein encyclopedia" providing pre-calculated phylogenetic trees for protein families found in animal genomes. The tool enables analyses of the effects of allelic variation on pathogenicity and host response, for all pathogens with sequenced genomes. Potential student research projects in the group include work on a new extension of PhyloFacts, to provide biochemical pathway identification and analysis tools in a phylogenomic framework. The new tool can be applied to metagenomic studies of environmental datasets.
***Additionally, UC Berkeley currently has a collaborative program with the IIT-Kharagpur which brings Indian students to conduct research in UC Berkeley labs every summer. Learn more at Berkeley-IIT Kharagpur Collaboration.