Prof. H.A.Nagarajaram is a computational biologist. He was trained under the tutelage of Prof. C. Ramakrishnan (Molecular Biophysics Unit, Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru, India) as his PhD supervisor and his PhD work focused on conformational studies on cyclic peptides and protein structural features. In addition, during his PhD days, he also collaborated with Prof. P. Balaram and Prof. Varadaraja Raghavan. His PhD work and the collaborative works together resulted in publications in journals such as the International Journal of Peptide and Protein Research, PNAS, FEBS Letters and Journal of Biosciences.
Soon after his PhD he moved to Prof. Sir Tom Blundell’s laboratory at Birkbeck College, London and later to the Department of Biochemistry, Cambridge University, UK, along with Prof. Blundell. During his four years in Prof. Blundell’s group, he studied the packing of secondary structures among protein families. He determined how the volume of buried amino acid residues is correlated to the packing distances among secondary structural elements. These findings were published in peer-reviewed journals Protein Science and Protein Engineering. He was also involved in collaborative projects where he contributed to developing a homologous superfamily database called HOMSTRAD and developing a side-chain modelling method. These collaborations culminated in publications in the journals such as Structure and Biopolymers.
In 2000 he returned to India and joined the Centre for DNA Fingerprinting and Diagnostics (CDFD) and established the Laboratory of Computational Biology, which developed into one of the vibrant research groups at CDFD. He was also made the India Node Manager of EMBNet, India Node at CDFD and the Head of the Bioinformatics Facility. Under his headship, the Bioinformatics Facility gained popularity to the extent that M/s Sun Microsystems, in collaboration with the then State Government of Andhra Pradesh, came forward and established one of its global Centre of Excellence in Medical Bioinformatics. Furthermore, he was sent as one of the Indian delegates from DBT to Malaysia to establish cooperation in Biotechnology. He also conducted the first ASEAN-India Bioinformatics workshop, where scientists from the ASEAN countries participated, and this workshop was sponsored by the Ministry of External Affairs, Government of India.
At CDFD, his research group focused on two projects: a) Protein structure prediction and analyses, which culminated in developing methods for protein fold prediction and functional impact of missense mutations and publications in journals such as Bioinformatics and Human Mutation, and b) Evolution and distribution of simple sequence repeats in bacterial genomes which resulted in the development of databases and publications in the journals such as NAR, Bioinformatics and BMC Genomics. Later, he diversified into systems biology (network biology), focusing on topological aspects of human protein-protein interaction networks. He made seminal discoveries on highly connected proteins (hubs). These works resulted in publications in journals such as Proteomics, Journal Proteome Research, Bioinformatics and Molecular Biosystems.
In 2017 he was offered a Professor position by the University of Hyderabad in their prestigious and vibrant School of Life Sciences. In 2018 considering his experience and expertise, he was made the first Head of Department of the newly established Department of Systems and Computational Biology. He was also made the Professor-in-charge of the Centre for Modelling, Simulation and Design (CMSD), which served for three years.
In the Department of Systems and Computational Biology, School of Life Sciences, his research group is actively pursuing studies on human protein-protein interaction networks under different contexts. His work on Intrinsically disordered regions (IDRs), especially developing substitution scoring matrices for aligning IDRs and studying their evolution, has received broad appreciation. The matrices are now part of the Bioinformatics software suite BIOCONDUCTOR. In addition, he has been part of two international projects on analysing volatile compounds from urine and blood to develop volatile compounds as cancer biomarkers. These projects were in collaboration with a group from NCCS, Pune, University of Madeira, Portugal and Rostock Medical Centre, Germany. In addition, he is also actively involved in collaborations within the School of Life Sciences. So far, the independent research on human protein interactome and collaborations have resulted in publications in journals such as FEBS Letters, Biochemical Journal, Biomolecular Structure and Dynamics, Computational Biology and Chemistry, etc.
Under his guidance, 13 students have completed their PhDs and one is preparing thesis.Two students are currently working for their PhDs. In addition, several master's students have done and dong their project works.
He has received extramural funding as PI and Co-PI from DBT, DST, CSIR, and also some private companies. He was part of mega projects such as CSIR’s NMITLI.
Currently leading the following mega project:
DBT Centre for Microbial Informatics (DBT-CMI), funded by DBT’s BTISNet
The DBT-CMI has entered into an MoU with the Anthropological Survey of India (AnSI) to analyze the gut microbiomes of some tribal communities in India using metagenome sequencing (please click for details).
