C Choudhury, UD Priyakumar, GN Sastry
Mycobacterial cyclopropane synthase 1 (CmaA1) is one of the most important drug targets in anti tuberculosis drug discovery as it is responsible for cis-cyclopropanation at the distal position of unsaturated mycolates, which is an essential step for the pathogenicity, persistence and drug resistance.
G Suresh, UD Priyakumar
Chemically modified oligonucleotides offer many possibilities in utilizing their special features for a vast number of applications in nucleic acid based therapies and synthetic molecular biology. Locked nucleic acid analogues (α-/β-LNA) are modifications having an extra ring of 2′-O,4′-C-methylene group in the furanose sugar.
S Padhi, RR Burri, S Jameel, UD Priyakumar
The viral protein U (Vpu) encoded by HIV-1 has been shown to assist in the detachment of virion particles from infected cells. Vpu forms cation-specific ion channels in host cells, and has been proposed as a potential drug target. An understanding of the mechanism of ion transport through Vpu is desirable, but remains limited because of the unavailability of an experimental structure of the channel.
S Rai, S Ranjan, H Singh, UD Priyakumar,
Gold cluster–nucleobase complexes have potential applications in designing and fabrication of novel electronic nano-devices, and there has been a surge in research activities in this area recently.
G Suresh, UD Priyakumar
DNA–RNA hybrids are heterogeneous nucleic acid duplexes consisting of a DNA strand and a RNA strand, and are formed as key intermediates in many important biological processes. They serve as substrates for the RNase H enzymatic activity, which has been exploited for several biomedical technologies such as antiviral and antisense therapies. To understand the relation of structural properties with the base composition in DNA–RNA hybrids, molecular dynamics (MD) simulations were performed on selected model systems by systematically varying the deoxypyrimidine (dPy) content from 0 to 100% in the DNA strand.