Pigment Cell Biology Lab

Pigment producing cells of the human skin offer a tantalizing opportunity to decipher molecular determinants of cell fate transitions. The continuum of melanocyte fate from its derivation from neural crest, to its response to ultraviolet radiations and their loss in depigmenting disorders are of interest to my laboratory. Visual tracking of melanin makes this an excellent model system to study molecular orchestration events in both cells as well as model organisms.

Derived from neural crest lineage, progressive fate-restriction and stem cell assignment are critical for development, differentiation and regeneration of melanocytes. While the fate-commitment events have distinct transcriptional footprints, fate-biasing is often transitory and metastable, and hence is difficult to establish. We employ CRISPR-Cas9 based targeted mutagenesis of candidate genes in zebrafish to study the molecular mechanisms behind these melanocyte fate transitions. This is complemented by experiments with cells to traverse the molecules-to-cells-to organism connect, which also serves as a validation.

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS

• Raja, D.A., Subramaniam, Y.J., Aggarwal, A., Gotherwal, V., Babu, A., Tanwar, J., Motiani, R.K., Sivasubbu, S., Gokhale, R.S., Natarajan, V.T., 2020. Histone variant dictates fate biasing of neural crest cells to melanocyte lineage. Development.

• Raja, D.A., Gotherwal, V., Burse, S.A., Subramaniam, Y.J., Sultan, F., Vats, A., Gautam, H., Sharma, B., Sharma, S., Singh, A., Sivasubbu, S., Gokhale, R.S., Natarajan, V.T., 2020. pH‐controlled histone acetylation amplifies melanocyte differentiation downstream of MITF. EMBO Rep. 21.

• Grover, R., Burse, S.A., Shankrit, S., Aggarwal, A., Kirty, K., Narta, K., Srivastav, R., Ray, A.K., Malik, G., Vats, A., Motiani, R.K., Thukral, L., Roy, S.S., Bhattacharya, S., Sharma, R., Natarajan, K., Mukerji, M., Pandey, R., Gokhale, R.S., Natarajan, V.T., 2019. Myg1 exonuclease couples the nuclear and mitochondrial translational programs through RNA processing. Nucleic Acids Res. 47, 5852–5866.

• Vij M, Grover R, Gotherwal V, Wani NA, Joshi P, Gautam H, Sharma K, Chandna S, Gokhale RS, Rai R, Ganguli M, Natarajan VT., 2016. Bioinspired Functionalized Melanin Nanovariants with a Range of Properties Provide Effective Color Matched Photoprotection in Skin. Biomacromolecules. 12;17(9):2912-9.

• Gautam P, Chaurasia A, Bhattacharya A, Grover R; Indian Genome Variation Consortium, Mukerji M, Natarajan VT., 2015. Population diversity and adaptive evolution in keratinization genes: impact of environment in shaping skin phenotypes. Mol Biol Evol. 32(3):555-73.

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