Department: Biological Sciences (DBS)
Email: rahul.das [at] iiserkol.ac.in
Personal Website: Click Here
The main interest of our laboratory is to understand the mechanism of signal transduction across the plasma membrane. Our research is focused on studying the allosteric regulation of two tyrosine kinases, ZAP-70, a membrane-associated protein kinase found in T-Cells, and transmembrane receptors like VEGF receptors, respectively. Kinases are known to function as dynamic signaling switches. However, they are not turned on (active state) and off (inactive state) by one factor. How kinases toggle between inactive conformations to an active conformation has been the subject of many studies. It is believed that an intricate circuitry of intra- and inter-molecular allosteric networks (mainly through non-covalent interactions) present in the regulatory and the catalytic modules control the kinase activity. Our laboratory is particularly interested to understand the role of protein dynamics in modulating extracellular signals transduction across the plasma membrane. We use spectroscopy techniques (like NMR spectroscopy and fluorescence spectroscopy) to study the structure and dynamics of the regulatory module of the membrane-associated kinases. We connect the structural data to the biological function by combining the biochemical analysis and cell-based studies to find out how they work.
