Bappaditya Chandra
Assistant Professor
Research Interest(s):
My research focuses on an exciting area: how "phase-separation" affects cancer progression. In simple terms, we study how proteins and nucleic acids form droplet-like assemblies without membranes, acting as high-density reaction centers. We're curious about what protein features lead to these assemblies and how they influence different types of cancer.
A key goal of my lab is to decode the molecular grammar of amino acid sequences governing these fusion protein driven phase transitions in different cancers. Along with the fusion protein, I will also explore how the disordered domains of transcription factors mediate cell signaling and how upon mutation or post translational modification they contribute to aberrant signaling which promotes cancer. Although the phase transition has been linked with different cell signaling, it’s still unclear how phase transition assembles hundreds of different biomolecules inside the cell and how many of them are crucial for the function. I will explore how the disordered region mediated formation of transcriptional assemblies help to create a 3D mesh network of transcriptional regulatory partners, through mass spectrometry-based proteomics analysis.
Contact Information:
Office: Sugihara 306
Phone:
Email: bappaditya.chandra@ndsu.edu
Ph.D.
Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai, India
Postdoc
St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital
External Links
Google Scholar Link
This work will reveal new drug targets and inspire bioengineers to make new artificial transcription factor chimeras that can be designed with programmed phase separation tendencies based on sequence algorithms. My interdisciplinary training traversing biophysics, structural biology, molecular biology, cell biology and cancer biology make me ideally suited to spearhead this work at the cutting edge of gene regulation, phase separation, and disease.
My lab will undertake ambitious projects at the interface of gene regulation, phase separation biophysics, structural biology, and translational research. While I utilize an array of approaches spanning advanced microscopy to genomic assays, the core necessities are capabilities in 1) quantitative live-cell imaging, 2) recombinant protein production/biophysics, and 3) cell line cultivation and molecular biology.
I am interested in exploring how intrinsic flexibility encoded within the protein disordered regions, allows transcription factors to control gene regulation activity in cells. Although many mutations, modifications, and gene fusions within the disordered regions of different transcription factors are known to be associated with diseases, how the specific amino acid sequence grammar within the disordered regions governs its functions is still an open question. At the same time, whether phase separation based functional mechanism is common across many genomic abnormalities is still an ongoing debate.
This work will reveal new drug targets and inspire bioengineering designs leveraging protein shape-shifting abilities. My creativity centers on a sweet spot linking basic discovery with applications to detect or correct diseases tied to malformed transcription factories inside cells.