CCMB Daak - Building leaders in science

This Daak reminds us the potential of ripples that our work can create in building a community of scientists, innovators and changemakers. Check out all the interesting stories and meetups lined up in the coming months at CCMB. Pic courtesy: Shining Water by Fudezuka Toshihisa

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OMICS-2021: Omics in Redefining Modern Biology

CCMB is organizing OMICS-2021, the 13th Annual Meeting of Proteomics Society of India from 20-23 Oct, 2021. In this online international meeting, we will have multiple sessions by international experts in proteomics, genomics, lipidomics and metabolomics across various disciplines of life sciences. There will be special skill training sessions for students on the Education Day. Keep an eye on the schedule - it will be out soon.

Latest research at CCMB

Not how much but how many mellitin molecules

Melittin, a small protein (called a peptide) naturally found in bee venom, causes cells to puncture/lyse. This peptide is also a popular system to understand how lipids and proteins interact in biological membranes. Prof Amitabha Chattopadhyay’s lab took advantage of their expertise in the latter to understand the type of cells melittin can lyse better.

They assembled two types of membranes in their lab - one with more negative charges (called anionic) and the other containing both positive and negative charges (called zwitterionic).

Of the two, melittin binds better to anionic membranes but lyses the zwitterionic membranes more. This is surprising because tighter binding to the membrane is thought to allow melittin to puncture the membrane more.

Their study finds that the key to this mystery lies in how melittin binds to other (neighboring) melittin. On zwitterionic membranes, melittin interacts with more of its neighbors and exists as larger clusters (oligomers). Larger clusters are believed to form pores and puncture cells better.

Such information on how proteins behave on cell membranes to control cellular lysis could help us kill harmful cells, including those with antibiotic resistance.

Complex diseases = many genes behind it

Leber's hereditary optic neuropathy (LHON) happens due to faulty mitochondrial function, and affects vision. 3 primary and 16 secondary variants of mitochondrial genes were known to be responsible for the disease. However, upon sequencing entire mitochondrial DNA of 189 LHON patients, Rajan Jha et al from Thangaraj's lab find that most of these patients lacked the 'primary variants'.

They rather found disease gene variants all across the mitochondrial genome. Hence, they also suggest sequencing of entire mitochondrial DNA. and not select portions for LHON diagnosis.

Genetic study to validate origin of Roman Catholics of west coast India

Who are Roman Catholics settled in the west coast of India? Historians and anthropologists have long argued of their lineage from the Gaud Saraswat Brahmin community. Others have believed them to be members of Jews Lost Tribes. Genetic study by Thangaraj's lab at CCMB and Niraj Rai's lab at Birbal Sahni Institute of Paleosciences found genetic affinity to Gaud Saraswat Brahmins. But they also found consequences of Portuguese inquisition as well as Jewish genetic components in the Roman Catholic population in west India.

Many congratulations

Join us in congratulating Divya Tej Sowpati for the CSIR Young Scientist Award 2021 in Life Sciences. He works on big data in biology with bioinformatic tools. Find more about his work here.

Milo CCMB - What is India's way out of the genetic disease burden?

Milo CCMB is an initiative that aims to inspire you with our work. We bring you snippets of our work through videos, and create avenues to interact with our scientists.
Our latest discussion is on India's roadmap to solving its genetic disease burden - one that is estimated to impact 7 crore Indians today.

Can Indians stop consanguinity? Would Indians opt for genetic counseling more widely?

We are working with teacher communities for us to better explain the problem consanguinity brings in an Indian socio-cultural context. Currently, we are working with the Telangana Social Welfare Residential Educational Institutes Society, and hoping to reach out to their many students across 260+ institutes. We are trying to enable these young children, soon to be adults to create roadmaps for their communities on how to fight the genetic disease burden in their local context.
If you are a school/college network, and would like to do similar workshops for your teachers, do get in touch with us at socialmedia@csirccmb.org.

Opportunities at CCMB - in coronavirus genomics & beyond

COVID Wise with some of the country's experts

Check detailed thoughts and deliberations from some of the leading scientists in India who have worked on COVID-19 pandemic in different capacities from various angles.

Link to discussion

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