ASET Colloquium

A phytochemical atlas to harness traditional Indian knowledge

by Prof. Areejit Samal (IMSc Chennai)

Friday, March 11, 2022 from to (Asia/Kolkata)
at Online ( https://zoom.us/j/91427966752 )
Description
I will present our large-scale effort to map and analyse the phytochemical space of Indian medicinal plants. This has led to the largest digital resource, IMPPAT, which provides an extensive natural product chemical space for ongoing research efforts in drug discovery and human wellbeing. Notably, there is a subset of drug-like phytochemicals within IMPPAT that have no significant similarity to existing FDA-approved drugs. Further, we find that our phytochemical space is similar to several natural product spaces in terms of certain physicochemical properties such as stereochemical complexity and shape complexity, and moreover, these spaces differ from commercial compounds. A comparison of phytochemicals from Indian herbs in our resource with those from Chinese herbs finds that the majority of IMPPAT phytochemicals are unique. In sum, our work provides a new perspective on traditional Indian medicine through the interdisciplinary lens of computational biology.

In the last 5 years, my group has contributed to the compilation, curation, and exploration of several chemical spaces which are either beneficial or harmful to humankind. Before concluding, I plan to also briefly present our work on characterizing the chemical space of endocrine disruptors which has contributed to the national policy of a European nation.

About the Speaker

Areejit Samal is a faculty member in the Computational Biology group of The Institute of Mathematical Sciences (IMSc), Chennai and Head of a Max Planck Partner Group for Mathematical Biology. He was also a Ramanujan Fellow of the SERB and Simons Associate of ICTP until 2021. He obtained his Bachelors, Masters and PhD in Physics from the University of Delhi, India. Thereafter, he did Postdoctoral research at the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences, Leipzig (2008-2012), CNRS / LPTMS, Orsay (2010-2012), Institute for Systems Biology, Seattle (2012-2013), and ICTP, Trieste (2013-2014) before returning to India. His primary research interests are in the applications of network science to study biological systems. More information on his research group is available at: https://www.imsc.res.in/~asamal/.
Organised by Dr. Satyanarayana Bheesette