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WELCOME and THANK YOU for your interest in me and my Research.

I am currently an NIH (National Institute of Health, USA) funded Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology, Harvard University. I am also a member of the Harvard Program in Therapeutic Sciences (HiTS), Harvard Medical School. My research spans in the realm of “Evolutionary Biophysics” and I look at the natural world through the prism of “Evolution”.

One of the current focuses of my research has been the development of the “Evolution-informed” drug discovery pipelines to primarily address the problem of drug resistance. The strategy presents a potential solution to the healthcare threat posed by Antibiotic/Multi-drug resistant microbes/bacteria. As per CDC (Center for Disease Control, USA) records, over an estimated 700000 people die each year owing to drug-resistant bacterial infections. Thus, coming up with innovative ways to tackle the problem stands as the “need of the hour”. My strategy aims at first understanding as to how bacterial cells EVOLVE to ESCAPE drug actions and then constraining the bacterial “evolvability” adopting anti-evolution strategies.

I am inspired by the works of Yuval Noah Harari and take his “A Brief History of Tomorrow” approach to predict and envision molecular solutions by visiting and resurrecting Evolutionary histories. My solutions of future are rooted to the nuances of the past.

My broad research interests and future objectives would involve development and deployment of futuristic solutions spanning from synthetic “multi-functional proteins” and “anti-aggregation” drugs for neurodegenerative diseases to “anti-bacterial/cancer” therapeutics by decoding principles of “Evolution”.

Selected Publications

Chowdhury, S., Zielinski, D.C., Dalldorf, C., Rodrigues, J.V., Palsson, B., and Shakhnovich, E. (2022). Empowering systems-guided drug target discovery with metabolic and structural analysis bioRxiv, 2022.2005.2017.444532. (https://doi.org/10.1101/2021.05.17.444532) (Just Accepted, May15th 2023) Nature Communications

Sanyal, D., Banerjee, S., Bej, A., Chowdhury, V.R., Uversky, V.N., Chowdhury, S@., and Chattopadhyay, K. (2022). An integrated understanding of the evolutionary and structural features of the SARS-CoV-2 spike receptor binding domain (RBD). International Journal of Biological Macromolecules.

Serebryany, E., Chowdhury, S., Woods, C.N., Thorn, D.C., Watson, N.E., McClelland, A.A., Klevit, R.E., and Shakhnovich, E.I. (2022). A native chemical chaperone in the human eye lens. Elife 11, e76923.

Zhang, Y., S. Chowdhury*, J. V. Rodrigues and E. Shakhnovich (2021). "Development of antibacterial compounds that constrain evolutionary pathways to resistance." Elife 10. [Selected for the "Evolution Medicine" special issue]

Sannigrahi, A., S. Chowdhury*, B. Das, A. Banerjee, A. Halder, A. Kumar, M. Saleem, A. N. Naganathan, S. Karmakar and K. Chattopadhyay (2021). "The metal cofactor zinc and interacting membranes modulate SOD1 conformation-aggregation landscape in an in vitro ALS Model." Elife 10: e61453. [Selected for Elife special story]

Chowdhury, S., S. Sen, A. Banerjee, V. N. Uversky, U. Maulik and K. Chattopadhyay (2019). "Network mapping of the conformational heterogeneity of SOD1 by deploying statistical cluster analysis of FTIR spectra." Cellular and Molecular Life Sciences 76(20): 4145-4154.

Chowdhury, S., D. Sanyal, S. Sen, V. N. Uversky, U. Maulik and K. Chattopadhyay (2019). "Evolutionary analyses of sequence and structure space unravel the structural facets of SOD1." Biomolecules 9(12): 826.

*Co-first author/Equal contribution

@ Corresponding Author

Get in touch at: sourav_chowdhury@fas.harvard.edu

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