The Department of Chemistry is pleased to announce that Dr. Yamuna Krishnan will join the faculty as a Professor during the summer of 2014. Yamuna is an organic chemist who develops and applies DNA-based tools to problems in chemical biology. She is moving from the National Centre for Biological Sciences, where she has been since 2005. She received her PhD in Organic Chemistry in 2002 from the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, where she worked with Santanu Bhattacharya on the structures and self-assembly properties of cholesteryl lipids and applications in gene transfection (delivery of nucleic acids into cells). As an 1851 Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Cambridge with Shankar Balasubramanian, she investigated quadruplex DNA and DNA mimics. In 2005 she set up her group at the National Centre for Biological Sciences, Bangalore and initiated a program on intelligent DNA-based molecular devices to interrogate cellular processes.
Yamuna is interested in uncovering new functions of DNA that go beyond its traditional role as life’s genetic material. These functions stem from its physicochemical properties that enable the creation of programmable, molecular devices. She envisions that this general approach will provide the means to systematically design and construct next-generation probes of biological processes in living systems. In addition to the relative increase in the number of its component molecules, it is emerging that the complexity of an organism arises from how these components are hierarchically networked. New technological developments have enabled researchers to begin studying biology quantitatively in terms of modules, networks and unifying principles that had remained hitherto elusive. A significant challenge to such quantitative approaches to biology is that the contributions of the many different sub-components of a system are still unknown.
She seeks to create nucleic acid based sensors that will provide quantitative information on contributors to a pathway by measuring protein activity mirrored in spatiotemporal concentrations of selected second messengers within cells. Second messengers are quantitative correlates or outputs of specific pathways or networks. Therefore the contribution of various sub- components in a pathway can be accessed through such sensors by deleting the sub-components and measuring the concentration of a relevant downstream second messenger correlate. Such approaches are particularly suited to the study of biological systems where individual constituents are systematically deleted from a complete system in order to understand their specific roles.
Her lab has established a platform technology that uses nucleic acid based sensors to quantitatively measure second messenger concentrations in sub-cellular compartments in live cells and in vivo. She has established this for cations like protons, anions like chloride and small molecules like cyclic AMP. She is now realizing sensors for other second messengers that have been challenging to quantify in vivo. This platform technology can be applied to a host of problems in infection, neurobiology, cellular traffic and cell-cell communication. The overall goal is to enable innovative live-imaging assays that can lead to a step-change in our understanding of these phenomena by visualizing related biological processes “lit up” by these fluorescent sensors.
More information about Yamuna's research may be found at:
http://www.ncbs.res.in/yamuna