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...

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September 4, 2022

  • Himani's paper on a novel variable loop in dynamin posted on the bioarxiv  (click here for the preprint).

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August 30, 2022

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June 22, 2022

  • Krishnendu get the EMBO Travel Grant to attend the EMBO conference on Birth and Fission of Cellular Compartments.

  • Shilpa get the Infosys Travel Grant to attend the EMBO conference on Birth and Fission of Cellular Compartments.

  • 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).

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April 19, 2022

  • The Pucadyil Lab gets awarded the Team Science Grant from DBT Wellcome Trust India Alliance (click here to know more).

 

February 14, 2022

  • 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)

  • 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)

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