The theme of the lab is to study how membrane homeostasis is established in cells. Membrane homeostasis ensures there is the right amount of material at the plasma membrane- such the correct "tautness" is achieved. Neither too taut - nor too lax is good. The plasma membrane undergoes incessant fluctuations closely coupled to this "excess area" and hence is "tautness" or membrane tension. Why is this important? Because much of the membrane's functions are affected and regulated by membrane tension - endocytosis (we look at its local regulation), motility (we look at collective cell migration), cell-cell fusion (we follow initial stages of myogenesis), to name a few. "Local" ? Yes. Using Interference Reflection microscopy (IRM) we map the basal membrane fluctuations and infer the tension map too - so yes - we can actually locally map tension. How bad is this - what are its limitations - read our work - and wait for more! Well - the membrane is closely linked to teh underlying actin cytoskeleton and Total Internal Reflection Fluorescence (TIRF) and wide-field imaging are our eyes to look deeply into fluctuations and state of actin/myosin. One of our central themes is to under mechanoprotection in cells. We sometimes hypo-osmotically shock cells, or stretch them out or de-adhere them - to impart mechanical perturbations. It is well established that the onset of mechanical perturbations triggers cellular responses - activating mechanisms that can preserve membrane homeostasis and hence its integrity. We use the different techniques to ask a repertoire of questions - all finally will end up teaching us about mechanisms of establishing membrane homeosiasis. 

What’s going on :

Sept 2025: BS talks at 65th ICBL meeting in Innsbruck, Austria; Tanmoy talks at Biomembrane Days in Berlin, Germany. Many feedback received.

Aug. 2025: Arkadeep, Kaustav and Tanvi - join us for their 5th yr BSMS project. Welcome!!

Aug. 2025 : Read BioRxive here : we contribute to "Spatio-temporal regulation of ligand trafficking and TLR9 activation involves PIEZO1 mechanosensing in human plasmacytoid dendritic cells" by Dipyaman Ganguly's lab. Great work by Upasana.

July 2025: New BioRxive - Ananya's work : "Inhibiting ezrin triggers formin-mediated actin remodelling reducing cellular mechano-protection". Read here. Husain and Jibitesh have contributed too. We are intrigued and continue digging!

June 2025: Alekhya was at Conforce 2025! Kudos.

May 2025: Husain officially joins the lab. Cheers! Looking forward to some great work.

April 2025: Purnashree finishes a Flow cytometry certificate course. Good job.

April 2025: We (Jibitesh and I) happy to be in Rahul Das lab's work. Read here.

Mar. 2025: Subhendu's work in collaboration with Arnab Gupta lab now BioRxived. Read here about "Non-canonical regulation of the plasma membrane copper transporter CTR1 through modulation of membrane mechanical properties".

Feb 2025: Read here - "Actin contractility and endocytosis create apico-basal tension gradient in HeLa cells". Bioarxived now. Good job Tanmoy and team. Old collaborative work started with Ayan Banerjee lab.

Nov. 2024: Upasana awarded the Best Poster Award at the 15th National Workshop on Fluorescence and Raman Spectroscopy & 17th International Conference on Optics within Life Sciences (16-21 November 2024) held in the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, India. Congratulations!!

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Sept. 2024: Biswas (Parijat) et al out in eLife. Great work on cell volume regulation by Deepak Sinha's lab at IACS. We have contributed with experiments by Jibitesh - Congrats! Read here.

Aug 2024: Welcome Rohan, Diana, Anandita - our new 5th yr BSMS students. And we have Kaustav and Tanvi - 4th yr BSMS students exploring the lab.

Aug 2024: Our interest and inputs into TNFR1 clustering is growing. More contribution by Jibitesh to work from DKS lab (IACS) - now on Bioarxiv. Read here.

July 2024: Mutiple meetings. Tanmoy was at Conforce 2024. Ananya was at Biomembranes 2024 (IISc, Bangalore).

June 2024: Baishali visits us from McGill University to work on her IRM data with Alekhya and Sharmistha (Kalyani University) wakes up the stretchers with Upasana - we had C2C12 growing on PDMS again! Great time with both.

May 2024: Congratulations Dr. Tithi Mandal !! Well defended.

May 2024 :Congratulations to Tanmoy, Tithi. Our work with Sreekanth and Dhruba on "Estimate of entropy production rate can spatiotemporally resolve the active nature of cell flickering"!! now accepted in PRR (Physical Review Research).

April 2024: Congratulations to Upasana, Tithi and Madhura for review accepted in ACS Omega. "The Plasma Membrane and Mechanoregulation in Cells". Read here.

Jan, Feb 2024: DBT-Abberior Advanced STED workshop @ IISER Kolkata. Research taks, hands-on sessions - very enriching.

Jan 2024: Welcome Purnashree! Our newest lab member - PhD scholar.

Dec 2023: SERB promises support!

Dec 2023: Read Tithi's paper here.

Nov 2023: Last day of Nov brings GOOD news finally. Tithi, Arikta, Tanmoy's paper accepted at CMLS. Balle balle !! Congratulations to all authors !!

Nov 2023: Congratulations to our current master's student Animesh Sanjay Sinha for bagging a supercool job at TCS!!

Nov 2023: Absolutely great discussions with our CEFIPRA collaborator, Prof. Christophe Lamaze during his stay in campus.

Oct 2023: Read the Piezo work with Dipyaman Ganguly Lab here.

Oct 2023: Congratulations to now Dr. Suvam Mukherjee for defending his thesis.

Oct 2023: Congratulations to Suvam and Jibitesh, Madhav and Team JDS. Check out our collaborative work here.

Sept 2023: Tithi off to Venice for an EMBO Workshop — When biology of endocytosis meets physics.

Updates LONG due:

14 Oct 2022: Congratulations Madhura! Now online: Chakraborty M, Sivan A, Biswas A and Sinha B (2022) Early tension regulation coupled to surface myomerger is necessary for the primary fusion of C2C12 myoblasts. Front. Physiol. 13:976715. doi: 10.3389/fphys.2022.976715

15 Aug 2022: Bio Open cover highlighted by Biomedical Picture of the day: http://bpod.mrc.ac.uk/

June 2022: Alekhya gets cell sheets from zebrafish and confirms they too have "non-sticky" followers!!

June 2022: Great participation at BAW 2022 by Jibitesh, Upasana, Tithi and Madhura. Upasana delivers a talk. Others: posters. Hold on! Madhura gets 2nd prize for poster presentation on the Bio Open work :)

June 2022: Muhamad Shameem starts working on cell-sheets with Alekhya. Welcome Shameem!

May 2022: Tanmoy works with SPIE student chapter for "SPARKLE -2022"  to celebrate International Day of Light with ~ 80-90 school students. BS talks.

May  2022: Avec Sreekanth and Dhruba: Measuring entropy generated from membrane fluctuations!! Good job Tanmoy with great help from Tithi. Check the archived manuscipt here.

April 2022: We contribute a bit - an important bit - to the story of macromolecular crowding and volume regulation in cells from DKS lab of IACS. Jibitesh shows how tension is affected on blocking TNFR1 signaling. Check here.

April 2022: We have over ~ 16 students from the Physiology Department, West Bengal State University for a lab visit. The day is spent demonstrating TIRF and Optical Trap experiments and short talks by all research scholars.

March 2022: Gangeya BPS student Chapter steps in to celebrate BIOPHYSICS WEEK :)

March 2022: BioOpen publishes out first work on collective cell migration AND we get the cover :) Check out the paper here. CONGRATULATIONS Madhura, Baishali, Nanditha !!

Dec 2021: our First post-doc fellow Dr Subhendu Chatterjee: Welcome!

August 2021: Three new lab members! Alekhya, Jibitesh and Upasana. Also Nanditha and Aritra start their MS thesis work.

28 January 2021: CONGRATULATIONS to Dr. Rinku Kumar for defending and earning his PhD. External: Prof. Shamik Sen, IIT, Bombay. All the best!

January 2021: New review with Arikta, Rinku now published at : Journal of the Indian Institute of Science, (), 1-15

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s41745-020-00217-x

Jan 2021: New lab member: Tanmoy - embarking on the path to PhD... welcome!