Mrinal Bhattacharyya

University of Hyderabad, India

Dr. Bhattacharyya is a Professor of Biochemistry at the University of Hyderabad, India. He completed his B. Sc. in Chemistry and M.Sc. in Biochemistry from University of Calcutta, India. He performed his Ph. D. work in Molecular Biology at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, India, where he investigated molecular aspects of naturally acquired immunity to human malarial parasite Plasmodium falciparum. Prof. Bhattacharyya worked as a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at Johns Hopkins University, USA, where he initiated the study on homologous recombination (HR) in P. falciparum; and begin to understand how HR could be involved in the generation of genomic diversities in this parasite. He started his career as a Research Scientist in Tulane University School of Medicine, USA, where he worked on DNA repair and telomere maintenance of yeast chromosomes and found intriguing relationship between Mre11 (a protein involved in DNA repair) mediated DNA damage response (DDR) and telomere maintenance.  The long-term research interest of Professor Bhattacharyya is to unravel how nuclear and chromosomal context influence the seeming inaccuracy in DNA repair that provides a pathogen with the necessary means to manipulate the “host-pathogen interaction”. Thus, research activities in Bhattacharyya laboratory aim to understand genomic integrity and plasticity of protozoan parasites. Professor Bhattacharyya has made significant contributions to our mechanistic understanding of DNA double strand break (DSB) repair pathways of P. falciparum, which provides promising avenues for new antimalarial therapies. He has identified the sensor of DSB (PfalMre11); the strand-invasion recombinase PfRad51; and the resolvase PfBlm, and established the essential roles of these proteins in Plasmodium biology. He has further established that in P. falciparum homologous recombination is the predominant mechanism, that cannot be compensated by other DSB repair mechanisms. Additionally, he has discovered two small molecule inhibitors targeting PfRad51 or PfBlm with significant anti-parasitic activity.