Yamuna Krishnan
University of Chicago, USA
Yamuna Krishnan is Professor and Brain Research Foundation Fellow of Chemistry at the Grossman Institute of Neuroscience, University of Chicago. She received her PhD from IISc, Bengaluru (2002), and did her postdoctoral research at University of Cambridge, UK (2005). Research in her laboratory spans organic synthesis, nucleic acid biophysics, biochemistry, molecular biology, and cell biology. Her lab has pioneered the deployment of DNA nanodevices as quantitative fluorescent reporters of second messengers for in vivo imaging. She is the recipient of many awards including the Infosys Prize for Physical Sciences (2017), the AVRA Young Scientist Award (2014), the Wellcome Trust Senior Fellowship (2010), and the INSA Young Scientist Medal (2009). She is also the youngest woman recipient of the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Award (2013) and has featured in Cell’s 40 under 40 (2014). She was selected as an Associate of the Indian Academy of Sciences during 2005–2009.
Session 1D: Symposium on “Remembering Francis Crick: A multifaceted visionary scientist”
Manju Bansal, IISc, Bengaluru
Quantitative chemical imaging in vivo
DNA can be self-assembled into molecularly precise, well-defined, synthetic assemblies on the nanoscale, commonly referred to as the designer DNA nanodevices. In this context, the speaker’s lab works on creating synthetic, chemically responsive, DNA-based fluorescent probes. In 2009 Yamuna and co-workers discovered that these designer nanodevices could function as fluorescent reporters to quantitatively image ions in real time in living systems. This marked the first-ever study on the functioning of DNA nanodevices inside a living cell without being interfered with or interfering with, the cells own networks of DNA control. In this talk, the speaker will discuss some unpublished work on how her lab has expanded this technology from ion imaging to quantitatively imaging reactive species as well as enzymatic cleavage with subcellular spatial resolution in vivo.