Professor, Department of Biological Sciences & Bioengineering (BSBE)
Research Interest
We are mainly interested in understanding the mechanism of membrane protein function using computational approaches. We have been investigating water-transporting aquaporin channels and the related members forming the superfamily of major intrinsic proteins from different species. Another major area of research interest is to understand the molecular mechanism of recognition between proand anti-apoptotic Bcl-2 family members. We have combined sequence analysis tools, structural bioinformatics approach and molecular dynamics simulations to address the above research problems.
Education
PhD, (Molecular Biophysics) Indian Institute of Science (1993)
M.Sc., (Mathematics) Madurai Kamaraj University (1986)
B.Sc., (Mathematics & Chemistry) Madurai Kamaraj University (1984)
A. B. Gupta, R. K. Verma, V. Agarwal, M. Vajpai, V. Bansal & R. Sankararamakrishnan (2012) MIPModDB: A central resource for the superfamily of major intrinsic proteins. Nucleic Acids Res. 40: D362-D369.
P. Prakash and R. Sankararamakrishnan (2010) Force field dependence of phospholipid headgroup and acyl chain properties: Comparative molecular dynamics simulations of DMPC bilayers. J. Comp. Chem. 31: 266-277
D. Lama and R. Sankararamakrishnan (2010) Identification of core structural residues in sequentially diverse and structurally homologous Bcl-2 family of proteins. Biochemistry 49: 2574- 2584.
A. B. Gupta and R. Sankararamakrishnan (2009) Genome-wide analysis of major intrinsic proteins in the tree plant Populus trichocarpa: Characterization of XIP subfamily of aquaporins from evolutionary perspective. BMC Plant Biol. 9: Art. No. 134 (28 pages).
A. Jain, C. S. Purohit, S. Verma and R. Sankararamakrishnan (2007) Close contacts between carbonyl oxygen atoms and aromatic centers in protein structures: pi-pi or lone-pair-pi interactions? J. Phys. Chem. B 111: 8680-8683.
National Bioscience Award for Career Development (Dept. of Biotechnology, Govt. of India) (2008).
Joy Gill Chair Professor for young faculty (2007-2010)
U.S.V. Chair Professor (2011-2014)
Commendation letters from the Director, IIT-Kanpur for excellent teaching in "Structural Biology and Biophysics" and in "Bioinformatics and Computational Biology" courses
