The National Centre for Biological Sciences is pleased to welcome Sabarinathan Radhakrishnan, who joins the Centre as its newest faculty member.
Sabarinathan is a computational biologist who specialises in genome sequence analysis as a predictor of structural and functional nature of genes. During his PhD with Prof. Jan Gorodkin at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark, he worked to elucidate the effect of single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNP) on RNA secondary structure, based on the RNA folding algorithms. It was in this process that he developed the unique algorithm named “RNAsnp”, which was more sensitive to local structural changes of RNA than any of the available methods. With his expertise in handling large datasets, Sabarinathan then joined the laboratory of Prof. Nuria Lopez-Bigas at the Institute for Research in Biomedicine (IRB) in Barcelona, Spain as a Post-Doctoral Fellow. His study there focussed on understanding cancer from a genomics perspective. For his research in the Lopez-Bigas laboratory, he was awarded the EMBO Long-Term fellowship. This platform enabled him to be an active participant of the International Cancer Genomics Consortia (ICGC) as well as The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA). In one of his recent studies, Sabarinathan showed that DNA-bound proteins interfere with the repair machinery, which results in an increased rate of DNA mutations at the protein bound sites.
In his own laboratory at NCBS, Sabarinathan will continue to apply algorithms and statistical models to big datasets in search of genetic mutations that drive cancer in humans. Through the analysis of these cancer genomic datasets compiled from an exceedingly large number of Indian patients, Sabarinathan hopes to effectively incorporate data into an integrated view of oncogenic pathways which would increase one’s ability to discover new cancer driver mutations.
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