WE ARE COMMITED TO

The IBAB Research Seminar Series is back! The first speaker for this academic year was Dr. Divya P. Kumar of JSS Medical College, JSS Academy of Higher Education and Research, Mysuru. Speaking on the topic ‘AATF: An emerging player in non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) and hepatocellular carcinoma’, Dr. Divya discussed how the apoptosis antagonizing transcription factor, i.e., AATF, regulates the pathophysiology of NAFLD and potentially, hepatocellular carcinoma. Her lab employs state-of-the-art techniques in both in vitro and in vivo systems to study AATF function and develop therapeutic strategies for the treatment of liver disease.

A new seminar series titled ‘Science and Society’ has been initiated at IBAB. The first speaker of the series was Dr. Arun Bhatt, who was the Medical Director of Novartis for several years, and the President of ClinInvent Research Pvt Ltd for over a decade. He is currently a consultant in Clinical Research & Drug Development, Mumbai area. His seminar regarding ‘The Scientific Foundation of Clinical Trials’ was well received and was followed by a lively discussion.

A recent study by the group of Dr. Shubhada Hegde was published in Scientific Reports, a Nature journal. The running title of the article is: ‘Tumor relevant protein functional interactions identified using bipartite graph analyses’. Here, the authors use bipartite graph principles to combine expression data from multiple cancer types and derive protein interactions, which are likely important for cancer specific functions.

Prof. Kshitish Acharya and team have published a recent study in Elsevier’s Journal of Biotechnology titled ‘Ex-Ex Primer: an experimentally validated tool for designing oligonucleotides spanning spliced nucleic acid regions from multiple species’. Dr. Kshitish’s team developed a new user-friendly computational program called Ex-Ex Primer to reliably create primers spanning exon-exon junctions and other probes for quantitative PCR applications. The tool can also be used to design primers to detect recombination, insertion and deletion events.