Divit Solanki

Happy to share that this work is now in press at Nature Communications! Led by @jskrockstar working with a great team of @Sandeep_IMSc @SwagataGhatak @urssahu Thanks to @niser_official @ANRFIndia @DAEIndia @India_Alliance for support. nature.com/articles/s4146…

Intro to mechanisms by which Mycobacteria subvert phagosome maturation to evade immune response @Ssaleem_M @niser_official Student Debraj: Mycobacteria release EVs spontaneously fuse w/ host plasma membrane & changes membrane tension. #OBMT26

Coarse grain Martini molecular model of Caveolin-binding shows that Caveolin both induces and senses membrane curvature. Caveolin binding induced curvature shows that cholesterol & PS are found in the neck. @durbignon @csir_ncl #OBMT26

Gearing up to host the 3rd Organelle Biology and Membrane Trafficking Meeting (OBMT-2026, 14-16th March) in Puri! Organized by @niser_official Supported by @ANRFIndia @Co_Biologists Looking forward to the cutting-edge science and stimulating discussions! sites.google.com/view/obmt2026/…

jack of all trades and master of fun.

When the rules of any card game are explained to me

this is how the alphabet looks from above – – – – – – – – · - – – — – – – – – – – – – — – – –

Remote Host Manipulation by Pathogenic Bacterial Extracellular Vesicles biorxiv.org/content/10.648… #biorxiv_cellbio

How to tell you are bookish without saying you are bookish

Isn’t this a gorgeous cover? Thrilled to see our work on how Aurora A shapes spindle-pole material properties featured on The EMBO J cover! Huge thanks to the @embojournal team, and to @AdhikaryKuheli & @madhubala98 for crafting these stunning images. doi.org/10.1038/s44318…

Google Maps is a more impressive achievement than any given physical wonder of the world, in my opinion.

This is an international catastrophe

Oh shit, my molecular dynamic simulation has successfully discovered Australia!

Rubisco is (arguably) the most abundant protein on Earth. (LPP surely comes close, right?) It’s an enzyme that fixes CO₂ into sugars during photosynthesis. Unfortunately, as most people learn in school, Rubisco is inefficient. Sometimes it confuses O₂ for CO₂ and wastes energy. Plants make up for this in raw concentration; up to half the soluble protein in a leaf is Rubisco. People have been trying to engineer better Rubiscos for many decades, but it's not easy because the proteins are big, do not fold easily (they need chaperone proteins to help out), are made from 16 subunits in land plants. But there's a new paper in Nature Plants that looks really interesting. The TL;DR is that a group in Australia figured out how to express plant Rubiscos (and all SEVEN of their folding chaperones) using a set of 3 plasmids inside of E. coli cells. This enabled them to do "directed evolution" of Rubisco in bacterial cells, and quickly find Rubisco mutants that have higher enzymatic efficiency or that fold better. In addition to the 3 plasmids, the researchers also coaxed E. coli to make ribulose-1,5-biphosphate, or RuBP, which is the 5-carbon sugar that Rubisco smashes into carbon dioxide to make molecules of 3-PGA for central metabolism. Now, the clever bit is that you RANDOMLY MUTATE the three plasmids encoding the Rubisco to make millions of variants. Then, you transform those mutated plasmids into E. coli. If the E. coli do NOT make a functional Rubisco, RuBP levels build up and kill the cell; the molecule becomes toxic. But if the E. coli DO make a functional Rubisco, then they keep the RuBP levels in check and live just fine. Using this "screening assay," the researchers found 46 fast-growing colonies of E. coli. Two of those colonies encoded really useful mutations. One mutation (M116L) makes Rubisco about 25–40% faster. The other (A242V) makes it fold and assemble much more efficiently. They put this mutation into a "hybrid Arabidopsis–tobacco Rubisco," put that into tobacco plants, and measured growth. The plants with M116L grew 75% faster than wildtype. No guarantees this will scale to more useful crops, like wheat and corn and soybeans etc. But it seems like a nice in vitro assay for faster prototyping!

A new paper on an issue that has been discussed for more than a century -- how can fundamental biophysical constraints on nutrient transport be overcome to solve one of the most significant challenges associated with the evolution of multicellularity? science.org/doi/10.1126/sc…

Don't get fooled by drone footages, the situation on ground is borderline unlivable.

Excited to share our lab’s latest preprint! Led by Jafar with great support from the whole team and in wonderful collaboration with @Sandeep_IMSc @SwagataGhatak, and @urssahu biorxiv.org/content/10.110…

Monsoon arrived in mumbai pune on 26 May, this is the earliest arrival of monsoon in mumbai in 21st century. Data source: imd #punerains #mumbai

Jayant Vishnu Narlikar [1938 - 2025] Astrophysicist, science communicator, institutional builder and mentor to generations of scientists. Indian science and society benefited greatly from his leadership and wisdom. Another Jedi is gone. en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jayant_Na…