Presenting Author
Purdue University
I did my Bachelors and Masters in Biotechnology from Panjab University, Chandigarh, India. For my PhD, I joined CSIR-Imtech, Chandigarh and worked on an essentail Serine/threonine mycobacterial kinase, PKA with focus on understanding role of its juxtamembrane residues towards its activity using biochemistry, molecular biology and structural biology as tools. I am currently a Postdoctoral Reserach Associate at Purdue University working on understanding regulation of gunaine nucleotide exchnage factors (GEFs) belonging to Dbl family of RhoGEFs using X-ray crystallography and Cryo-EM as tools. GEFs are important enzymes as they activate small GTPases which regulate pleothora of critical physiological processes like transcription, cytoskeletal remodelling etc. Dbl family of GEFs have about 69 members and these have conserved DH/PH module with variable regulatory domains which make them extermely interesting to study. I have been studying autoregulation of P-Rex1, a RhoGTPase mainly expressed in neutrophils and brain which activates Rac1 and known to be overexpressed in different cancers. In addition, I am involved in determining the structural basis of inhibition of some of other Dbl GEFs by small molecules.