Biology

Dr. Sudhakaran Prabhakaran
Dept. of Genetics, University of Cambridge, UK

It is an enigma where from hydra to humans, the numbers of genes or open reading frames
do not increase with increased organismal complexity. There is also a huge overlap of genome
among different organisms, for example, humans share 50% of genes even with banana. Hence,
the current understanding of the genome or proteome is not sufficient to explain cellular and organismal complexity. Aspects from my postdoctoral work have challenged the definition of a gene and indicated that there is more to the proteome and genome than what meets the eye. To understand complex diseases such as cancer and schizophrenia it is important to identify and understand this dark matter of the cell. In this talk, I will present a brief summary of my results from my postdoctoral work on non-canonical translational products and multisite posttranslational modifications of proteins, explain the implications of these findings, and briefly mention about the future directions of my research.
1. Prabakaran, S†., et al., Comparative analysis of Erk phosphorylation suggests a mixed strategy
for measuring phospho-form distributions. Mol Syst Biol, 2011.7: p. 482.
2. Prabakaran, S†., et al., Post-translational modification: nature's escape from genetic imprisonment and the basis for dynamic information encoding. Wiley Interdiscip Rev Syst Biol Med, 2012
3. Prabakaran, S†., Gunawardena, J. and Sontag, E. “Paradoxical results in perturbation-based signaling network reconstruction” Biophysical Journal 106 (12), 2720-2728 (2014)
4. Prabakaran, S*., Hemberg, M*., Chauhan, R*., Winter, D., Cullen, RT., Dittrich, C., Hong, E., Gunawardena, J., Steen, H., Kreiman, G., Steen, J.“Quantitative Profiling of Peptides from RNAs classified as non-coding” Nat Commun, 2014. 5: p. 5429
*co-first author