|
Samir K. Brahmachari
Director General, Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), India
(Former Director, Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology (IGIB), India)
|
| |
Biosketch:
Dr. Samir K. Brahmachari completed a Ph.D. in Molecular Biophysics and specializes in Structural Biology and Genome Analysis. He is presently the Director of Institute of Genomics & Integrative Biology (IGIB), Delhi under the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, India. Earlier he was a Professor of Molecular Biophysics and genetic Engineering at Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore.
Institute of Science, Bangalore. Professor Brahmachari has received many prestigious National and International Awards for his contributions in Science. He is a Fellow of Indian National Science Academy and Indian Academy of Science. He was elected a member of the Human Genome Organization, 1991 and to the HUGO Council in 2004; member of various Committees, Govt. of India; member, expert group on Human Rights and Biotechnology, United Nations and member of various International Committees. He has also been involved in issues relating to Genomics research, ethics and Human Rights. As a member of the steering committee of the International Human Rights Commission he has contributed to the formulation of the draft guidelines in terms of benefit sharing by the populations that are the part of the research endeavor as resources of genetic material and addressed issues of unethical exploitation of genetic resources of the Third world. He has contributed significantly in promoting industry-academia interactions through novel program of knowledge partnerships and.
He heads the Functional Genomics Unit at IGIB. He has demonstrated the structural flexibility of DNA and the role of repetitive sequences in DNA transactions much before the discovery of repeats association with genetic disorders. His work on the structural flexibility of telomeric repeat sequences is one of the well-cited contribution. He has made major contribution in molecular analysis of genetic disorders associated with trinucleotide amplification and repetitive sequence instability. Using a combination of structural biology, computational genomics and population based polymorphism scanning he and his group have provided a novel structural frame work for understanding the etiology of several neurological disorders. One of the outcomes of these efforts has been the demonstration that loss of triplet repeat interruption as the primary step in ataxia SCA 2 which is followed by repeat expansion. Dr. Brahmachari and his group also identified a susceptibility locus on chromosome 22 using a novel positional candidate gene approach for schizophrenia and bipolar disorder patients in the Indian population and have for the first time identified a nonsense mutation in synaptogyrin I gene, a component for presynaptic pathway in schizophrenia patients. His group has developed novel in Silico bioinformatics tools to identify functional signature of hypothetical proteins and novel drug targets. For further details visit http://www.igib.res.in/ |
