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Chemical Sciences Seminars

Simplifying the Complexity

by Dr. Sudipta Basu (Harvard-MIT Division of Health, Science and Technology, USA)

Thursday, June 2, 2011 from to (Asia/Kolkata)
at Colaba Campus ( AG-80 )
Description In multicellular organisms, biological signal transduction pathways regulate key functions such as survival, growth, differentiation and metabolism. These signaling pathways are almost invariably altered/highjacked in different diseases including inflammatory diseases (e.g. rheumatoid arthritis, multiple sclerosis), asthma, neurodegenerative diseases (e.g. Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease), obesity, diabetes and cancer. It is now increasingly clear that none of these signaling pathways operate in isolation. Instead, signals (extracellular or intracellular) propagate through a tangled network of interconnecting proteins and cascades rather than through independent linear route. These complex signaling networks and their influence on cellular behavior are regulated by protein-protein interactions. Hence, it is extremely important to decipher how these protein partners interact in spatial (three dimensional (3D)) and temporal (the fourth dimension) manner in system biology context to govern crucial biological processes in normal as well as in diseased states. Therefore, key challenges in next generation chemical biology are multifold: (a) understanding the crosstalk between different aberrant signaling pathways (b) deciphering the uncharted space in human interactome (c) understanding the spatio-temporal dynamics of protein-protein interactions in diseased network to predict the cellular behavior.
 
My strategy is to address these challenges by merging my strength in ‘chemical biology’ and ‘nanotechnology’ to develop novel program in “chemical nanobiotechnology”, where the understanding of biology will inspire the design of novel chemical structures that are spatiotemporally displayed to a cell using integrated nanotechnology platforms. In this talk, I will describe the chemical biology and nanotechnology based tools and techniques that I have developed to address the above questions, which opened up novel strategies to perturb different aberrant signaling pathways.