Pucadyil Lab
Membrane fission proteins and their functions in physiology
Cell membranes are formed by the spontaneous self-assembly of amphipathic lipids into a 5 nanometer-thin bilayer sheet. Membranes have unique mechanical properties. Foremost among them is their stability to bending, fission and vesiculation. This property lies at the heart of evolution choosing lipids as the material to contain life within cells and viruses choosing the same material to contain their genetic material. But cells have also evolved mechanisms to compartmentalise their cytoplasm into vesicles and organelles, and viruses appear to have subverted this same process towards packaging their genetic material and budding out of host cells. Vesiculation requires active bending and fission of the membrane - processes that are managed by specialised protein machines. At the Pucadyil Lab, we identify such protein machines and understand the physiological context of their functions.
Lab news...
March 21, 2023
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Himani gets invited to give a talk at the EMBO Cell Polarity and Membrane Dynamics meeting.
Feb 9, 2023
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Himani's paper on a novel variable loop in dynamin accepted in PNAS (click here for the paper).
Jan 20-24, 2023
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The Pucadyil Lab attends the 45th All India Cell Biology Conference at Varanasi. This is somewhat of a lab retreat as well (see the photos).
September 4, 2022
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Himani's paper on a novel variable loop in dynamin posted on the bioarxiv (click here for the preprint).
August 30, 2022
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Uma, Megha and Gurmail get selected to present posters at the EMBO Phosphoinositide meeting.
June 22, 2022
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Krishnendu get the EMBO Travel Grant to attend the EMBO conference on Birth and Fission of Cellular Compartments.
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Shilpa get the Infosys Travel Grant to attend the EMBO conference on Birth and Fission of Cellular Compartments.
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Our response to a recent paper claiming that Drp1 does not catalyze fission gets published as Letter to the Editor in PNAS (click here to read).
April 19, 2022
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The Pucadyil Lab gets awarded the Team Science Grant from DBT Wellcome Trust India Alliance (click here to know more).
February 14, 2022
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Devika's and Himani's paper on SUPER template pulldowns accepted in a special issue dedicated to Erwin London in the Journal of Membrane Biology (click here for an updated preprint)
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Krishnendu's paper on metal binding in the mitochondrial Drp1 accepted in a special issue of membrane remodelling in the Journal of Membrane Biology (click here for an updated preprint)
Indian Institute of Science Education and Research
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