Department of
Biology

Kundan Sengupta obtained his BSc from St. Joseph’s College, Bangalore and MSc in Microbiology from Bangalore University. He undertook PhD in Molecular Biology from DBS, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR) Mumbai followed by postdoctoral research at the Lab of Thomas Ried, National Cancer Institute, NIH, USA and was a research fellow at the lab of Pathology, NCI/NIH, USA. He joined IISER Pune in 2010 as Assistant Professor and was awarded the Wellcome-DBT India Alliance Intermediate Fellowship. He is currently Professor in Biology at IISER Pune.

Research

Chromosome biology in development and disease

Role of nuclear Lamins in regulating genome organization and function: Genomics approaches such as Hi-C, further substantiate that the genome is non-randomly organized in the nucleus.  Ongoing studies in Dr. Kundan Sengupta's group are focused on the role of nuclear Lamins in regulating nuclear structure and function in cancer cells. These experiments revealed that while lamin depletion induced chromosomal aneuplodies in diploid colorectal cancer cells. Interestingly, the nuclear locations of these aneuploid chromosome territories were altered in the interphase nucleus. Furthermore, gene expression analyses of Lamin depleted cells also showed a significantly deregulated transcriptome. The group's current experiments focus on unraveling the underlying mechanisms by which Lamins and Lamin B Receptor (LBR) regulates chromosomal stability in colorectal and breast cancer cells.

Selected Publications

Patil, S. Jahagirdar, S, Khot M, and Sengupta K (2021), Studying the role of chromosomal instability (CIN) in GI cancers using patient-derived organoids, Journal of Molecular Biology.

Shah R, Sharma A, Kelkar A, Sengupta K, Galande S (2021). A novel cis regulatory element regulates human XIST in CTCF-dependent manner. Mol Cell Biol, 41, 8.

Patil, S and Sengupta, K. (2021) Role of A- and B-type lamins in nuclear structure-function relationships, Biol. Cell, 1-16.

Khot M, Sreekumar D, Jahagirdar S1, Kulkarni A1, Hari K, Faseela EE, Sabarinathan R, Jolly MK, Sengupta K (2020). Twist1 induces chromosomal instability (CIN) in colorectal cancer cells. Hum. Mol. Genet. 29(10):1673-1688.

Pradhan R, Jayakrishnan MN and Sengupta K (2020) Lamin A/C modulates spatial organization and function of the Hsp70 gene locus via Nuclear Myosin I (NM1). Journal of Cell Science, 133. 133(4):jcs236265.

Pradhan R and Sengupta K (2019) Imaging chromosome territory and gene loci positions in cells grown on softer matrices. Methods in Mol. Biol. 2038:181-197.

Ranade D, Pradhan R, Jayakrishnan MN, Hegde S and Sengupta K (2019) Lamin A/C and Emerin depletion impacts chromatin organization and dynamics in the interphase nucleus BMC, Molecular & Cell Biology, 20(1):11

Sengupta A, Joshi G, Pawar S and Sengupta K (2018) Nucleolin modulates compartmentalization and dynamics of histone2B-ECFP in the nucleolus. Nucleus 9(1).

Sengupta K. Genome 3D-architecture: its plasticity in relation to function (2018) J. Biosciences. 43,2.

Pradhan R, Ranade D, Sengupta K (2018) Emerin modulates spatial organization of chromosome territories in cells on softer matrices. Nucleic Acids Res. 46(11):5561-558