Lab News

Prof. R. Sowdhamini was felicitated with Professor Darshan Ranganathan Memorial Lecture Award (2022) at Ramaiah college, from the Indian National Science Academy (INSA).

Mohammed Shafi successfully defended his Ph.D. thesis, submitted to the Trans-Disciplinary University, on 20th March, 2023. Shafi's thesis work involves study of transcriptomes from Moringa plant and its antidiabetic property. Congratulations, Dr. Shafi !!

Dheemanth Regati attended a conference on Machine Learning for Molecular Sciences (ML4Science 2023) from 9th - 12th March, 2023 at Kodaikanal. He participated in a Hackathon at the event and bagged the prize for best Methodology. Congratulations, Dheemanth !!

 

To commemorate the 25th year of CAPS LAB, aka Lab25, Prof. R. Sowdhamini led the initiatives to spread the world about the 25 years journey of Computational Approaches to Protein Science, through weekly CAPS-Talks series. The talk series outlines the stories from protein sequence to structure and their functions. The talk series commenced on 2nd February 2023.

Pankaj Kumar Chauhan successfully defended his Ph.D. thesis, submitted to the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, on 30th January, 2023. Pankaj's thesis work involves study of genes and proteins implicated in Cardiomyopathies. Congratulations, Dr. Pankaj !! 

 

Dr. Adwait Joshi, Mohammed Shafi and Abhishek Sharma have participated in presenting posters at the NCBS Annual Talks 2023: Patterns in Biology held between January 23th and 25th, 2023. Abhishek Sharma was awarded one of the NCBS Best Poster Prize. Shailya Verma presented a talk on " A genome-wide search of TIR domains containing proteins."

CAPS lab members attended ICSBCADD'2022 conference held at Alagappa University,  Karaikudi, Tamil Nadu from 21-25 November 2022. 

Prof. R. Sowdhamini presented a talk titled "Exploring the medicinally important secondary metabolites in fenugreek through transcriptome studies" in this conference. 

Dr. B. Nagarathnam, Dr. Adwait Joshi, Dr. Meenakshi Iyer, Mohammed Shafi, Pankaj Chauhan, Vikas Tiwari, Abhishek Sharma and Shailya Verma presented poster at this conference. Dr. B. Nagarathnam and Dr. Meenakshi Iyer won the best poster prize.

 

Dheemanth Regati from the GS-2022 batch has joined our lab in November 2022. Welcome to CAPS group.

 

Pankaj Chauhan, Vikas Tiwari and Shailya Verma were selected to present poster in the 21st European Conference on Computational Biology 2022 (ECCB). It was held from 19 - 21 September 2022 at Sitges, Barcelona. The travel was supported by SERB, Infosys and DBT travel awards.

The university of Agricultural Sciences, Bengaluru organised an International Conference on “Biotechnology Trends & Future Prospects” from 13th to 15th September, 2022. Prof R. Sowdhamini was invited as speaker for the event under the theme Crop Improvement by molecular and Biotechnological Approaches.

We celebrated 24th Lab day on 27 June 2022. Happy birthday CAPS !!

As a part of MoU between TNAU and NCBS, an Endowment Lecture was delivered by Prof. R. Sowdhamini on 'de novo Transcriptomics Assembly of Moringa'. The event was jointly organised by School of Post Graduate Studies and Department of Plant Molecular Biology and Bioinformatics, TNAU on 08 June 2022. A workshop on “Virtual workshop - Computational Genomics” was jointly organized by the National Centre for Biological Sciences, TIFR, Bengaluru and the Department of Plant Molecular Biology and Bioinformatics from 8 - 12 June, 2022 at Tamil Nadu Agricultural University (TNAU), Coimbatore. Dr. Adwait Joshi and Dr. Meenakshi Iyer were part of the organizing commitee for the workshop.

MoU was signed between Tamil Nadu Agricultural University (TNAU), Coimbatore and NCBS on 29^th April 2022 in presence of Prof. R. Sowdhamini.

Prof Mamannamana Vijayan sadly passed away on 24 April 2022. His contributions to science will keep inspiring future generations. https://news.ncbs.res.in/community/obituary-prof-mamannamana-vijayan

 

Sarthak Joshi, Revathy Menon and Aditi Pathak from the GS-2021 batch has joined our lab in Feb 2022. Welcome all to CAPS group.

 

Pankaj Kumar Chauhan and Shailya Verma have participated in presenting virtual posters at the NCBS Annual Talks 2022: Facets of Biology held between January 10th and 13th, 2022. Shailya Verma was awarded one of the NCBS Best Poster Prize.

 

Dr. Sheetal Ambardar has been selected as Assistant Professor, Microbiology at Jammu University. Greetings !!

 

Neha V. Kalmankar successfully defended her Ph.D. thesis, submitted to the The University of Trans-Disciplinary Health Sciences and Technology, on 6th December, 2021. Neha worked on cyclotides from Clitorea ternatea commonly known as Shankapushpa. Congratulations, Dr. Neha !! 

 

Neha's work on cyclotides was accepted as cover page article in journal of medicinal chemistry (https://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/acs.jmedchem.1c00033) and was also covered by Deccan Herald (https://www.deccanherald.com/city/top-bengaluru-stories/cyclotides-from-...)

 

Bhavika Mam joined as a post-doc in the Institute for Human Genetics, California.

 

Prof. Sowdhamini has been honoured as Mazumdar-Shaw Chair in Computational Biology at IBAB.

 

Teerna Bhattacharyya successfully defended her Ph.D. thesis, submitted to the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, on 23rd September, 2021. Teerna's thesis work involves study of Tyrosine Phosphatases. Congratulations to her !! 

 

Following obituary articles dedicated to the memory of late Prof. Narayanaswamy Srinivasan (1962-2021) were published.

https://www.bioinformation.net/018/97320630018600.pdf

https://academic.oup.com/bioinformatics/article/38/8/2377/6520803

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/prot.26287?af=R

/sites/default/files/users/vikast/NS_AUw.pdf

https://www.currentscience.ac.in/Volumes/121/09/1252.pdf

 

Sadly, our beloved collaborator, Prof N. Srinivasanhttp://pauling.mbu.iisc.ac.in/, passed away. We lost him on 3rd September 2021.

His passion and dedication for science will continue to inspire us!                

 

Vikas Tiwari, Shailya Verma and Abhishek Sharma have participated in presenting virtual posters at the NCBS Annual Talks 2021: Zooming through biology held between January 6th and 9th, 2021.

 

Naveen Kumar N. successfully defended his Ph.D. thesis, submitted to the Bharathidasan University, on 5th November, 2020. Many Congratulations !! 

 

Vikash Kumar from the GS-2019 batch has joined our lab in October, 2020 as a PhD candidate.

 

Pankaj Chauhan and Dr. Meenakshi Iyer participated in poster presentation at the NCBS Annual Talks 2020: Circle of Life held between January 14th and 17th, 2020. Meenakshi was awarded one of the NCBS Best Poster Prize.

 

A scientific team led by Professor R. Sowdhamini identified 33 molecules with the potential to target a COVID-19 protein. The team includes Abhishek Sharma and Vikas Tiwari. This work has been published in the Journal of Biosciences and has gained coverage in Hindustan Times, Economic Times as well as Careers360.

http://news.ncbs.res.in/research/needle-haystack-computational-search-na...

https://www.hindustantimes.com/cities/researchers-identify-33-molecules-that-can-target-1-covid-19-protein/story-jK8MpYyk654BIs8aW5r1TN.html 

 

The preprint can be found at Chemrxiv:

https://chemrxiv.org/articles/preprint/Computational_Search_for_Potential_COVID-19_Drugs_from_FDA-Approved_Drugs_and_Small_Molecules_of_Natural_Origin_Identifies_Several_Anti-Virals_and_Plant_Products/12091356

 

We celebrated 21st Lab day on 27 June 2019. Happy birthday CAPS !!

 

Meenakshi Iyer was selected to participate in the conference The 20th Conversation: Albany, 11th to 15th June 2019, at the State University of New York (SUNY), Albany. https://www.jbsdonline.com/c4330/c4331/topics-speakers-chairs-and-guests-p18928.html. The abstracts submitted by the oral and poster presenters were published as a supplement to Journal of Biomolecular Structure and Dynamics (JBSD).

The latest work from our lab features insights on the medicinal and therapeutic uses of Moringa oleifera, also known as 'drumstick', and has garnered press attention as well. Media coverage by the Deccan Herald (https://www.deccanherald.com/national/bengaluru-scientists-crack-moringa-mystery-734493.html),      The Hindu (https://www.thehindu.com/sci-tech/science/medicinal-properties-of-drumstick-tree-unravelled/article27196675.ece and https://www.thehindu.com/sci-tech/energy-and-environment/g-rooting-for-a-superhero/article28318404.ece) and by the crowdsourcing platform Efforts for Good (https://effortsforgood.org/good-to-know/moringa-superfood/) has helped convey our findings to the masses.

Our newly minted Dr. Snehal Dilip Karpe has joined Dr. Anne Van den Broeke's group working at Institute Jules Bordet in Brussels, Belgium as a Post-doctoral Fellow- Bioinformatician on April 1st, 2019. Their work, funded by FNRS, Belgium will be in collaboration with Prof. Michel Georges from GIGA , University of Liège and involves genomics analysis of tumour evolution in HTLV-1/BLV induced leukemia progression. Congratulations and wishing you the best ahead!

 

The Biomolecular Interactions Symposium (BIS) in the honor of Prof. P. Balaram was co-organized by Prof. Sowdhamini R, Dr. Radhika Venkatesan, Prof. Mathew M K and Dr. Gurunath (IITK) at NCBS, Bangalore between 18th and 19th of February, 2019. CAPS group members also helped out with the exciting event, details of which can be found here.

 

Shailya Verma from the GS-2018 batch has joined our lab as an Integrated PhD candidate on the 11th of Feb, 2019. Welcome to CAPS group, Shailya!

 

Dr. Sheetal Ambardar has joined our lab as a Postdoctoral Fellow on the 1st of February, 2019. Her fellowship is funded by the DST Women Scientist A (Government of India) scheme. Welcome to CAPS group, Sheetal!

 

Meenakshi Iyer successfully defended her thesis towards Ph.D., submitted to the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, on the 1st of February, 2019. Her thesis seminar was on "Systematic accumulation, domain architectures and taxonomic analysis of homologues of protein structural domains". Congratulations, Dr. Meenakshi Iyer! Way to go!

 

Dr. Adwait Joshi was selected to present a talk at the conference The Language of Biology as part of the NCBS annual talks 2019. This talk was titled Protein domain architecture comparison for inferring homology between multi-domain proteins using alignment-free method and was presented on January 23rd, 2019.

Bhavika Mam, Neha V. Kalmankar, Soumya Rath, Teerna Bhattacharyya and Vikas Tiwari participated in presenting posters at the NCBS Annual Talks 2019: The Language of Biology held between January 20th and 23rd, 2019.

 

Prof. R. Sowdhamini presented a delightful science talk in Tamil, one of the oldest and major Dravidian classical languages known in history! This talk, as part of the Jigyasa Project, was titled "Revealing the science behind traditional practices through plant genome sequencing". The Jigyasa Project is a collaboration between Mandram and the Bangalore Life Sciences Cluster (BLISc) and its talks aimed to offer insights into the topic: Traditional Knowledge meets Modern Science. It was held at NCBS on the 15th of December, 2018.

 

Bhavika Mam was selected to participate in the Indo-US conference: Sculpting the Future of Medicine- Gateway to the post-proteogenome era (symposium and workshop) held at ACTREC, Navi Mumbai, India between 7th and 11th December, 2018. Bhavika was awarded second prize in the Best Flash talk series in the symposium.

 

Neha V. Kalmankar attended the 4th International Conference on Circular Proteins and Peptides at Kawasaki, Japan  between 28th to 30th November, 2018 & the 10th International Peptide Symposium (10th IPS) at Kyoto, Japan between 3rd and 7th December, 2018. She was selected to participate and present a poster in both the conferences for which she was awarded a Travel Award each. Neha was also selected to give a Hot-spot Talk at the 4th International Conference on Circular Proteins and Peptides conference.

 

Teerna Bhattacharyya attended the 17th European Conference on Computational Biology (and its pre-meetings) in Athens, Greece, 8/9-12th September. Along with volunteering for the event, Teerna also presented a poster titled "PASS2 version 6: a database of structure-based sequence alignments of protein domain superfamilies in accordance with SCOPe". In addition to a conference-sponsored registration-fee waiver, travel was funded by the Infosys foundation through an intramural grant.

Nithish Sathyanarayanan received Best speaker award at the 46th National Seminar on Crystallography (NSC46) organized by the Indian Crystallography Association at NIMHANS, Bangalore between June 27^th and 29^th, 2018. Congratulations, Nithish!

Adwait Joshi submitted his thesis towards Ph.D. to Manipal University on the 27th of June 2018!

We celebrated 20th Lab day on 27 June 2018. Happy birthday CAPS !!

Snehal Karpe presented her work at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL), New York, USA in two conferences. Her poster titled "Candidate olfactory receptor protein subfamilies involved in the shift to eusociality: computational survey of ORs from two solitary bees" was presented at the Biology and Genomics of Social Insects, 5th to 8th May 2018. Another poster titled "InsectOR : A web-server to identify olfactory receptor genes from insect genomes" was presented at the Biology of Genomes, 8th to 12th May 2018. Snehal also presented work at Prof. Gene Robinson's Lab at UIUC, Illinois and at Dr. Lucy Forrest's Lab at NINDS, NIH, Washington DC. Funding for the same was provided by DST-SERB International Travel Scheme and Infosys Travel Grant.

Soumya Nayak and Vikas Tiwari from the GS-2017 batch have joined our lab as PhD candidates. Binnu Gangadharan and Farah Haque from Prof. John Mercer's lab at inSTEM have joined our lab as bridging postdoctoral fellows. CAPS group extends a warm welcome to all! (Dec 2017/ Jan 2018)

Harini K, Meenakshi Iyer, Pankaj Chauhan and Mohamed Shafi presented posters at the Annual Talks at NCBS from January 3rd to 5th, 2018.

Pankaj Chauhan participated in the Indian Conference on Bioinformatics (InBIX'17 conference) organized by the Birla Institute of Scientific research and Bioclues.org at Jaipur between November 7-9, 2017. His work was also selected to be presented in the form of a short video abstract.

Bhavika Mam, Meenakshi Iyer, Neha Kalmankar and Teerna Bhattacharyya presented posters at the conference 'Structure Across Scales' in NCBS, Bangalore. October 7-8, 2017

Shaik Naseer Pasha has secured the DBT-MRC joint postdoctoral fellowship with Prof. R. Sowdhamini at NCBS and Dr. Carla Martins at the MRC Cancer unit at Cambridge. October 1st, 2017. Congratulations and we hope to see more amazing work in the future as well! 

Bhavika Mam participated and volunteered in the BC2 conference hosted by the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics at Basel, Switzerland. Sepember 12-15, 2017. She was also a visiting student at the University of Nantes, France.

Snehal Karpe and colleagues have published an interesting study on odorant receptors in bees with implications in eusocial behavior: Scientific Reports 7: 10823 (2017). The paper can be accessed here: Computational genome-wide survey of odorant receptors from two solitary bees Dufourea novaeangliae (Hymenoptera: Halictidae) and Habropoda laboriosa (Hymenoptera: Apidae) 

Pritha Ghosh secured a post-doctoral fellowship in the lab of Prof. Janusz Bujnicki at the International Institute of Molecular and Cell Biology, Warsaw, Poland. October, 2017. Congratulations and wish you success in future endeavours!

A study on RNA-binding proteins titled Bioinformatics comparisons of RNA-binding proteins of pathogenic and non-pathogenic Escherichia coli strains reveal novel virulence factors by Pritha Ghosh and R. Sowdhamini is now out: BMC Genomics 18:658 (2017).

Mahita Jarjapu successfully defended her Ph.D. thesis, submitted to the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, on 18th of August, 2017. Congratulations, Dr. Mahita Jarjapu! Her thesis seminar was on "Insights into Toll/interleukin-1 receptor (TIR) domain-mediated protein-protein interactions within the Toll-like receptor signalling pathway through computational approaches". Mahita's courage, hard-work, talent and persistence have been most inspiring to us all. Mahita has received bridging Postdoctoral Fellowship from NCBS and continues to work on some exciting projects in our lab!

A study co-authored by Mahita Jarjapu and R. Sowdhamini on the Integrative modelling of TIR domain-containing adaptor molecule inducing interferon-β (TRIF) provides insights into its auto-inhibited state is now out: Biology Direct 12:9 (2017)

Neha Kalmankar won the Best poster award for presenting her ongoing thesis work in the DST-SERB School of Chemical Ecology, 2017. Way to go, Neha! Congratulations! :)

We celebrated 19th Lab day on 27 June 2017. Happy birthday CAPS !!

Dr. R.S. Sajeevan has joined our lab as a National Postdoctoral Fellow on the 22nd of May, 2017. His project is sponsored by SERB (Government of India) and is titled: Engineering stress inducible super promoters for multiple abiotic stress tolerance in plants. Welcome to CAPS group, Sajeevan!

Dr. Pritha Ghosh and Teerna Bhattacharyya were selected to participate in the Annual Symposium of the Indian Biophysical Society  hosted at IISER Mohali from the 23rd to the 25th March, 2017. Pritha was invited to give a short twelve-minute talk as part of the Young Researchers Talk segment where she presented on A tale of two paralogs: Human Transformer2 proteins with differential RNA-binding affinities. Meanwhile, Teerna had been selected to present some of her thesis work as part of a poster titled Sequence and Structural Analysis of Gene Products containing Tyrosine Phosphatase Domain. It was an interesting experience for them both!

Mahita Jarjapu was among the five awardees of the Keystone Symposium Future of Science Scholarship to attend the Keystone Symposium Conference on Pattern Recognition Signalling:From Innate Immunity to Inflammatory Diseases at Banff, Canada from 19th to 23rd March, 2017.

In recognition of her scientific work impacting crop sciences thus helping farmers globally, Prof. Sowdhamini has been nominated as a "Food Hero" by CropLife International and Dr. Khader Shameer. The interview has been published here and the nominee profiles  may be viewed here, March 2017. Congratulations! You are our hero too! :)

Prof. Sowdhamini and Prof. Srinivasan gave talks in SBCADD '17 held in Alagappa University, Karaikudi between 14th and 17th February 2017.

Shaik Naseer Pasha successfully defended his Ph.D. thesis, submitted to Manipal University, on 9th February, 2017. Congratulations, Dr. Shaik Naseer Pasha! You too have made us very proud! Naseer joins as a postdoctoral fellow in Dr. Dhandapany Perundurai's lab at InStem.

Prof. Sowdhamini and Prof. Srinivasan gave talks in the National Conference on Computational Analysis of Molecular Data in Synergy with Biological Applications (CAMB-2017) held at Bishop Heber College, Trichy on 3rd February 2017.

Pritha Ghosh successfully defended her Ph.D. thesis, submitted to the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, on 25th January, 2017. Congratulations, Dr. Pritha Ghosh! You have made us very proud! Pritha has received bridging Postdoctoral Fellowship from NCBS and will continue to work on some more exciting work in our lab!

The review centred on protein-protein complexes and super hotspots is now out! To find out more, please read it here- "Specificity and stability of transient protein–protein interactions"   Online: 11th January, 2017

Dr. Kaushik Hatti, who submitted his Ph.D. thesis to the Molecular Biophysics Unit (MBU), IISc has joined our lab starting 2nd of January, 2016! Welcome Kaushik!!

Prof. Sowdhamini delivered a highly lauded talk to the student crowd on the 3rd of December at the DHR-sponsored Training Program on Drug Chemistry held between November 15th to December 14th, 2016 at the JSS College of Pharmacy, Mysore. It was very well-received and extremely appreciated!

Meenakshi Iyer attended the "National Symposium on Bioinformatics and Computational Systems Biology" held at Central University of Himachal Pradesh, Shahpur from November 12-14, 2016. She also gave a flash talk and presented a poster on "Search of sequence homologues and update of the GenDiS database".

Pritha Ghosh submitted her thesis towards Ph.D. to the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research on the 21st of October 2016!

Oommen Kaleeckal Mathew submitted his thesis towards Ph.D.  to SASTRA University on the 8th of November, 2016!

The paper titled "RStrucFam: a web server to associate structure and cognate RNA for RNA-binding proteins from sequence information" got published online on the 7th of October 2016. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27717309

Anshul Sukhwal submitted his thesis towards Ph.D. to SASTRA University on 4th October 2016!

Naseer Pasha submitted his thesis towards Ph.D. to Manipal University on 27th September 2016!

Snehal Karpe presented a short talk as well as a poster titled "Identifying odorant receptor multi-protein superfamily from Apis florea genome" at the prestigious International Conference on Bioinformatics (InCoB2016) in Singapore held between the 21st to the 23rd of September 2016. Snehal won the Bronze award for the poster! She was funded by Prof. Sowdhamini and also won a partial travel grant from many sources including the organizers of the conference APBionet (Asia-Pacific Bioinformatics Network) and CICS (The Centre for International Co-operation in Science). Congratulations, Snehal!

We celebrated 18th Lab day on 27 June 2016. Happy birthday CAPS !!

Atul Upadhyay successfully defended his Ph.D thesis, submitted to the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, on 23rd December, 2015. Congratulations, Dr. Atul Upadhayay!

Lab Alumnus Khader Shameer awarded BIRD Award, 2015

Khader Shameer, an alumnus of the lab, was awarded the Bioclues Innovation, Research and Development (BIRD) Award for the yer 2015 for his outstanding contribution to the area of Functional Genomics and Bioinformatics.

Research work on sequencing of lab Tulsi genome covered in news and news channels

in News

The Hindu

The research conducted in a joint project involving researchers from the lab as well as certain researchers of the Bangalore BioCluster leading towards the sequencing of the Tulsi genome and unraveling its medicinal properties was covered by The Hindu newspaper.

The link to the news article can be found here.

http://www.thehindu.com/sci-tech/health/medicinal-properties-of-tulsi-un...

NCBS webpage online:

http://news.ncbs.res.in/story/unraveling-mysteries-tulsi

Times of India:

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/home/science/Scientists-decode-humble-tulsi/articleshow/48893673.cms

Press club of India:

http://pressclubofindia.co.in/medicinal-properties-of-tulsi-unravelled/

Wikinews:

http://www.wikinewsindia.com/tag/ncbs/

Worldlypost:

http://www.wordlypost.in/bangalore-ncbs-scientists-unravelled-medicinal-properties-of-tulsi/

NDTV (September 9, 2015)
Titled: Indian Scientists Map Genome of Tulsi Plant
By: Pallava Bagla
http://www.ndtv.com/india-news/indian-scientists-map-genome-of-tulsi-plant-1215941

Deccan Herald

http://www.deccanherald.com/content/500915/indian-scientists-decode-tulsi-plant.html

in News Channels:

INDIATV (September 21, 2015)

https://youtu.be/bHy7j4D6HA8

SUNTV
http://caps.ncbs.res.in/download/Tulsi_news_videos/SunTv/mixed.mp4

Deccan Herald

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-GoFVWbRYVE

http://www.deccanherald.com/videos/watch/12132/gene-mapping-tulsi.html

We celebrated 17th Lab day on 27 June 2015. Happy birthday CAPS !!

Thesis defense by K.Harini

K.Harini was successful in defending her Ph.D thesis held on the 3rd June, 2015 in the NCBS campus.

From Ms. Margaret Sunitha to Dr. Margaret Sunitha

Margaret Sunitha, fondly known as Maggie, successfully defended her Ph.D thesis on 17th March, 2015.

Successful Ph.D thesis defence by Prashant Shingate

Prashant Shingate successfully defended his Ph.D thesis, submitted to Manipal University, on 30th January,2015.

Mahita Jarjapu awarded one of the NCBS Best Poster Prize

Mahita was awarded with one of the NCBS Best Poster Prizes during the NCBS Annual Talks, the theme of the talks being "Biology Across Scales", held from 5th to 8th January,2015.

Sony Malhotra successfully defends Ph.D thesis

Sony Malhotra successfully defended her Ph.D thesis, submitted to the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai, on 9th December, 2014.

Ph.D thesis defence by Eshita Mutt

Eshita successfully defended her Ph.D thesis, submitted to the International Institute of Information Technology (IIIT),Hyderabad on 6th November, 2014.

Two Ph.D students successfully submit doctoral thesis

Harini Krishnan and Margaret Sunita have submitted their Ph.D thesis to Bharathidasan University,Trichy, Tamil Nadu on June 27th, 2014.

We celebrated 16th Lab day on 27 June 2014. Happy birthday CAPS !!

Gandhimathi defends her Ph.D thesis

Gandhimathi successfully defended her Ph.D Thesis, submitted to Bharathidasan University, Trichy, Tamil Nadu, in March 2014.

Ph.D thesis defence by Swati Kaushik

Swati Kaushik successfully defended her Ph.D thesis,submitted to the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR Deemed University), Mumbai on 30th January, 2014.

Pritha Ghosh awarded DAAD fellowship

Pritha Ghosh was awarded with the DAAD - A New Passage to India fellowship (2013) to work at Dr. Stefan Juranek's laboratory at the Department of Biochemistry, Universität Würzburg, Würzburg,Bavaria, Germany on a collobarative project involving RNA-binding proteins. An article in this regard can be found at the link here:

http://www.uni-wuerzburg.de/sonstiges/meldungen/single/artikel/pioniere-a-1/

Reception for the guests from India. Persons shown in the photo: Upper row (from left): Alfred Forchel, Jürgen Kreft, Stefan Juranek and Andre Jäger. In front of them (standing): Pritha Ghosh, Subham Pandey and Sudarshan Kumar Kenettinkara. Lower row: Christian Klingenberg, Ajay Kumar Kolo, Ngaimuanching, Vijaya Sree Dondappagari and Stephan Schröder-Köhne. (Photo: Gunnar Bartsch)

(Source: http://www.uni-wuerzburg.de/sonstiges/meldungen/single/artikel/pioniere-a-1/)

Gandhimathi wins Best Poster Award

Gandhimathi won the second place in Best Poster Award for a poster entitled "structure-based virtual screening and evolutionary analysis for the identification of small molecule inhibitors to abrogate protein-protein interactions and paracrine Hedgehog signalling" during the International Conference on Recent Advances in Computational Drug Design organized by Schrodinger held on 16-17th Sep 2013.

Mahantesha submits Ph.D Thesis

Mahantesha successfully submitted his Ph.D thesis to the University of Agricultural Sciences,Bangalore on 16^th September, 2013.

We celebrated 15^th Lab day on 27 June 2013. Happy birthday CAPS !!

Research study leads towards the discovery of new odorant-binding proteins

A research study done by Prof. Sowdhamini and one of her Ph.D students, Malini Manoharan, in collaboration with Prof. Bernard Offman at the Université de la Réunion has led to the discovery of 110 new odorant-binding proteins in the genomes of three disease-transmitting mosquitoes:Anopheles gambiae,Aedes aegypti and Culex quinquefasciatus which are carriers of major human diseases like malaria,filariasis and chikungunya. The link to the news item covered by NCBS news can be found here:

http://news.ncbs.res.in/story/110-new-proteins-aiding-odor-detection-discovered-across-three-mosquito-genomes

NCBS-inSTEM team work that reveals structure adopted by tropomyosin contributes towards a better understanding of cardiomyopathies

Prof. Sowdhamini, along with her Ph.D student Margaret Sunita and a team of inSTEM researchers-Jim Spudich and John.A.Mercer have utilized findings from both experimental and theoretical studies to construct a detailed structural model of the tropomyosin in its so-called “open” position. This work has helped shed light on how the fourteen types of tropomyosin mutations can lead to the two types of cardiomyopathy-HCM (Hypertropic cardiomyopathy) and DCM (Dilated cardiomyopathy).NCBS news has covered this research study. http://news.ncbs.res.in/story/overcharged-heart . News coverage of the same is found here -> https://www.financialexpress.com/archive/how-studying-protein-mutations-can-help-combat-heart-diseases/1030905/0/

We celebrated 14^th Lab day on 27 June 2012. Happy birthday CAPS !!

Thesis submission by B. Nagarathnam

Nagarathnam submitted her Ph.D thesis to Anna University, Chennai on 21^st June, 2012.

MoU was signed between Bharathidasan University and NCBS on 10^th February 2012 in presence of Prof. Sowdhamini and Prof. Apurva Sareen.

Making the study of malformed proteins easy: Team of six construct database of 3D domain-swapped proteins

Prof. Sowdhamini along with her team of researchers-Shameer Khader, Prashant Shingate, S.C.P.Manjunath, M.Kartika and Ganesh Pugalenthi have successfully developed a database of 3D domain-swapped proteins, called 3DSwap after going through an intensive analysis including literature mining through hundreds of abstracts and scientific papers. During instances where 3D domain swapping can go wrong, it can lead to malfunctioning of proteins and result in protein aggregation and diseases like Alzheimers. The database, during its implementation contained 293 proteins that undergo 3D domain swapping. This makes it a lot easier for researchers working on Alzhemiers and other related diseases to find information at one place instead of having to search through literature. http://news.ncbs.res.in/story/swapping-long-drawn-data-searches-ingenuity-3dswap

Ganesh Pugalenthi wins BIRD Award 2011

Ganesh Pugalenthi won the Bioclues Innovation, Research and Development (BIRD) Award for the year 2011, awarded by Bioclues, a non-profit virtual organisation, for his work on the development of bioinformatic tools such as DIAL, SMotif,SPRED and ScanMot to anlayze protein sequences, structures and next-generation sequencing data, in the light of more and more databases being developed accompanied by an ever-increasing amount of data.

http://news.ncbs.res.in/story/ganesan-pugalenthi-wins-bird-award-2011

We celebrated 13^th Lab day on 27 June 2011. Happy birthday CAPS !!

Research paper on 5-HT_2A receptor receives Best Computer Aided and Molecular Design Award from VLife sciences, Pune

The research paper covering the work on the modelling and docking studies of 5-HT_2A receptor done by doctoral students K. Kanagarajadurai, Malini Manoharan , Aditi Bhattacharya and Principal Investigators, Prof.Mitradas Panicker and Prof. Sowdhamini received the Best Research Publication Award 2011 in the field of Computet Aided and Molecular Design.http://news.ncbs.res.in/page/news-snippets

Shameer Khader wins 1^st place in Eily Lilly and Company Outstanding Thesis Award Shameer Khader won the 1^st place in the Eily Lilly and Company Outstanding Thesis Awards for his doctoral thesis titled “Identification and analysis of domains in proteins”.http://news.ncbs.res.in/page/news-snippets

Prof. R. Sowdhamini receives Bharat Jyoti Award and Glory of India Gold Medal Prof. Sowdhamini has received the Bharat Jyoti Award from the International Friendship Society and the Glory of India

Gold Medal from the Institute of Success Awareness for the year 2011.

Prof. R. Sowdhamini elected as a Fellow of IAS and INSA

Prof. Sowdhamini was elected as a fellow to the Indian Academy of Sciences (IAS),Bangalore in January

2010.Subsequently she was elected as a fellow to the Indian National Science Academy (INSA), in December 2010.

 Prof. Sowdhamini with her certificate from the INSA

We celebrated 12^th Lab day on 27 June 2010. Happy birthday CAPS !!

Prof. Sowdhamini awarded HFSP Grant

Prof.R. Sowdhamini was appointed as the Principal Investigator for a project involving an interdisciplinary approach, employing bioinformatics, experimental biochemistry-biophysics and mathematical modelling. This award is special as it is the first HFSP programme grant where an Indian researcher is a Principal Investigator. This grant will be used to fund a research work on a group of mechanosensory proteins called myosins carried out between the labs of Prof R. Sowdhamini, Prof. James Spudich (Stanford University, USA) and Prof.Henrik Flyvbjerg (Technical University of Denmark).

http://news.ncbs.res.in/story/prof-r-sowdhamini-hfsp-awardee

Prof. Sowdhamini receives Young Woman Career Scientist Award

Prof. Sowdhamini was awarded the Young Woman Career Scientist Award by the Department of Biotechnology

(DBT), Govt. Of India on 12th April, 2007.

Prof. Sowdhamini receiving the Young Women Career Scientist Award

Prof. R. Sowdhamini was felicitated with Professor Darshan Ranganathan Memorial Lecture Award (2022) from the Indian National Science Academy (INSA).