Research Theme
The main focus of our research is to elucidate the physiological and pathological consequence(s) of variation in the structured regions and disordered regions (low-complexity sequences and repeats) of proteins. Specifically, we are invested in addressing the following three questions:
-
How does variation emerging under structural and functional constraints, provide specificity for global regulatory proteins under physiological conditions?
-
How do disease-linked genetic variants violate regulatory and functional constraints to affect pathological outcomes?
-
How does variation in eukaryotic pathogens facilitate pathogenicity/virulence and host-pathogen interactions?
We adopt a philosophy of data-driven discovery where we undertake computational investigations on large-scale biological data, followed by experimental investigations. For computational investigations we employ state-of-the art methods in Computational and Functional Genomics, Molecular and Evolutionary Systems Biology, Structural Bioinformatics and Machine/Deep Learning and perform experimental investigations using molecular biology, cell biology and biochemical methods/tools in human cell lines.