Roop Mallik
Indian Institute of Technology, Mumbai
Roop Mallik is Professor of biosciences and bioengineering at Indian Institute of Technology, Mumbai. He received his PhD in 1999 from TIFR, Mumbai. He was a faculty member at the Department of Biological Sciences, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Colaba, Mumbai from 2006–2020. His research interests are intracellular transport, biophysics of lipids and motor proteins, pathogen degradation, metabolism and liver biology, lipid homeostasis. He was elected Fellow of the Indian Academy of Sciences in 2017 and was elected Fellow of INSA in 2022.
Session 1A: Special Lecture
V Nagaraja
Fat on the move
Molecular motors are nano-scale machines that transport bacteria, virus, mitochondria etc. inside living cells. The use of optical tweezers for measuring the tiny forces exerted by these motors has been at the forefront of single-molecule interdisciplinary research for decades. Unfortunately, such studies reveal very little about how these motors function inside an animal. How tiny fat bodies are moved around by motors inside liver cells and how this motion reflects in blood tests will be discussed. The speaker will also describe his group’s attempts to control this motion for therapeutic benefits.