Raghunand R Tirumalai

Mycobacterium tuberculosis (M.tb) the causative organism of human tuberculosis is responsible for almost 2 million deaths annually. Even though the organism was first identified as being the cause of TB over a century ago, our understanding of the molecular basis of its pathogenicity remains nebulous. Treatment of cases requires multi-drug therapy for a minimum of 4-6 months and control of M.tb infection is complicated by the complex long-term nature of the host-pathogen interactions. Most often, the subsequent development of specific immunity results in ‘latent’ infection, and reactivation tuberculosis can therefore occur years after initial exposure. Our research group is focussed towards understanding the molecular basis of Latency, the identification of mycobacterial virulence factors and the discovery of novel targets for the development of anti-TB therapeutics.

Yeruva, V. C., Kulkarni, A. M., Khandelwal, R., Sharma, Y. and Raghunand, T. R. (2016). The PE_PGRS proteins of Mycobacterium tuberculosis are Ca2+ binding mediators of host-pathogen interaction. Manuscript accepted for publication, Biochemistry(ACS)

Sharma S.G.S., Kishore, V. and Raghunand T. R. (2016) Identification and functional annotation of mycobacterial septum formation genes using cell division mutants of Escherichia coli. Res Microbiol, 167(2):142-8

Viswanathan, G., Yadav, S. and Raghunand, T. R (2016) Identification of Novel Loci Associated with Mycobacterial Isoniazid Resistance. Tuberculosis 96:21-26

Viswanathan, G., Joshi, S. V., Sridhar, A., Dutta, S. and Raghunand, T. R (2015) Identifying novel mycobacterial stress associated genes using a random mutagenesis screen in Mycobacterium smegmatis. Gene 574(1):20-27

Tiwari, B., Maheswari R. U. and Raghunand, T. R. (2015) The Mycobacterium tuberculosis protein pair PE9 (Rv1088) - PE10 (Rv1089) forms heterodimers and induces macrophage apoptosis through TLR4. Cellular Microbiol 17(11): 1653-1669