Group Leader

Abhijit A Sardesai obtained his graduate (PhD) degree from the Centre for Cellular & Molecular Biology, Hyderabad, India in the broad area of microbial osmoadaptation in 2000. From 2000 to 2002 he worked as a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Geneva, Switzerland studying the mechanisms of protein folding in the bacterial periplasm. From 2002 to 2007 he worked as a research associate/project investigator at CDFD and joined its scientific staff in 2007. Abhijit's current research involves

1. The study of K+ (potassium) ion homeostasis in the bacterial cell, specifically conditions under which K+ become toxic to the cell.
   
   
2. Delineation of the mechanism by which exporter proteins belonging to the LysE superfamily exert their biological effects.
   
   
3. Exploiting the sophisticated genetic tools that the bacterium E. coli offers to infer the functions of ORFs from the bacterium M. tuberculosis, encoding components of cytoplasmic protein folding and redox homeostasis (Collaborator Dr S.C Mande, CDFD).
   
   
4. Studies on new genes involved in microbial osmoadaptation.

Research in these projects is being carried out by three PhD students and one scientific staff.