Ours is an interdisciplinary research program at the interface of chemistry and biology. We draw from disciplines as wide ranging as electrophysiology, lipidomics, protein chemistry and synthetic chemistry to address questions in mainly three areas summarized below.

Ion Channel Biology

A major thrust area of the group is to elucidate the molecular mechanisms underlying the opening and closing (gating) of ion channel proteins.

Ion channels are membrane proteins expressed in all cell types and are extremely important for life. For example, voltage-activated potassium and sodium channels expressed in neurons underlie the action potential which constitutes the nerve impulse. Other ion channels such as TRP channels are involved in a multitude of processes including thermal sensation and chemical sensing.

We have established the two-electrode voltage clamp (TEVC) and patch clamp electrophysiology set-ups in our lab and are employing them to study the gating of TRP and voltage-gated ion channels. We maintain a Xenopus laevis colony in our lab to procure oocytes for TEVC electrophysiology.

Lipid chemical biology

Another major focus of the laboratory is developing chemical biology-based approaches to study lipids.

There are thousands of lipids in cells, most with undefined function. One reason why lipids remain poorly understood as compared to proteins and nucleic acids is that powerful tools available to study them in cells are lacking.

We aim to address this urgent unmet requirement of efficacious approaches to study lipids by developing new technologies to label lipids in cells with synthetic, tailor‑made chemical handles, thereby endowing them with desired properties. We employ state-of-the art lipidomics (by using a triple quadrupole ion trap mass spectrometer that we have set up in our lab) and imaging approaches to rigorously characterize the resulting lipid labeling and employ these labeled lipids to discover lipid-interacting proteins by employing chemoproteomic approaches.

Bioconjugation

We are also actively working on developing efficacious methods for the site-specific labeling of biomolecules including proteins and lipids.

Projects on bioconjugation in the lab are organic chemistry-centric and involve the synthesis of organic compounds designed for orchestrating site-specific labeling of specific cellular biomolecules.