Faculty & Staff
Contact
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Email
chetanabaliga.bt.ls@msruas.ac.in
- Websites
Dr. Chetana Baliga
DBT-Ramalingaswami Faculty Fellow
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School/College
Faculty of Life and Allied Health Sciences
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Department
Department of Biotechnology
Dr. Chetana Baliga is an experimental biologist with 16+ years of research experience in diverse areas such as protein biophysics, molecular biology, ribosomal biology and antimicrobial research. She obtained her PhD degree under the guidance of Dr. Raghavan Varadarajan from the Indian Institute of Science, where she worked on understanding protein sequence-structure-function relationships. As a post-doctoral researcher at the Mankin-Vazquez lab at the University of Illinois at Chicago, she explored ribosome targeting antimicrobial peptides. She received the prestigious DBT-Ramalingaswami Re-entry Fellowship in 2023. She is currently pursuing research in the field of antimicrobial peptides, discerning their mechanisms of action and designing variants with improved activity against drug resistant bacteria.
Qualifications
- PhD (Biophysics)
Indian Institute of Science , 2016
- MSc (Biotechnology)
Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay , 2007
- BSc (Biotechnology)
BMS College for Women, Bangalore , 2005
Academic Experience
- 8 years of research experience, 2 years of teaching experience
- Combating Antimicrobial resistance (AMR)
- Antimicrobial peptides as novel antibiotics – mechanisms of action, rational design for improved efficacy
- Protein sequence-structure-function relationships
- Awarded the DBT-Ramalingaswami re-entry fellowship (DBT-RRF) in the year 2022-23
- Awarded the Early Career Research Award (ECRA) by the Vision Group of Science and Technology (VGST), Karnataka Science and Technology Promotion Society(KSTePS)
- Nominated to attend Emerging Science, Technology and Innovation Conclave (ESTIC) 2025, New Delhi as Young Leader in Science and Technology
- Junior Research Fellowship (JRF) (2008-10) and Senior Research Fellowship (SRF) (2010-13) from Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), India.
- First Rank holder of the Bangalore University, for Bachelor of Science (Biotechnology), 2005.
- Huang W, Baliga C, Aleksandrova EV, Atkinson G, Polikanov YS, Vázquez-Laslop N, Mankin AS. Activity, structure, and diversity of Type II proline-rich antimicrobial peptides from insects. EMBO Rep. 2024 Nov;25(11):5194–5211.
- Huang W, Baliga C, Vázquez-Laslop N, Mankin AS. (2024). Sequence diversity of apidaecin-like peptides arresting the terminating ribosome. Nucleic Acids Research 52(15):8967–8978.
- Baliga C, Brown TJ, Florin T, Colon S, Shah V, Skowron KJ, Kefi A, Szal T, Klepacki D, Moore TW, Vázquez-Laslop N, Mankin AS. (2021). Charting the sequence-activity landscape of peptide inhibitors of translation termination. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 118(10):e2026465118.
- Mangano K, Klepacki D, Ohanmu I, Baliga C, Huang W, Brakel A, Krizsan A, Polikanov Y, Hoffmann R, Vázquez-Laslop N, Mankin AS. (2023). Inhibition of translation termination by Drosocin, an antibacterial peptide from fruit flies. Nat Chem Biol 19:1082–1090.
- Skowron KJ, Baliga C, Johnson T, Kremiller KM, Castroverde A, Dean TT, Allen AC, Lopez-Hernandez AM, Aleksandrova EV, Klepacki D, Mankin AS, Polikanov YS, Moore TW. (2023). Structure-activity relationships of the antimicrobial peptide natural product Apidaecin. J Med Chem 66(17):11831–11842.
- Baliga C, Selmke B, Worobiew I, Borbat P, Sarma SP, Trommer WE, Varadarajan R, Aghera N. (2019). CcdB at pH 4 forms a partially unfolded state with a dry core. Biophys J 116(5):807–817.
- Baliga C, Majhi S, Mondal K, Bhattacharjee A, VijayRaghavan K, Varadarajan R. (2016). Rational elicitation of cold-sensitive phenotypes. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A 113:E2506–2515.
- Baliga C, Varadarajan R, Aghera N. (2016). Homodimeric Escherichia coli toxin CcdB folds via parallel pathways. Biochemistry 55:6019–6031.
- Shukla RT, Baliga C, Sasidhar YU. (2013). The role of loop closure propensity in the refolding of Rop protein probed by molecular dynamics simulations. J Mol Graph Model 40:10–21.
- Society of Biological Chemists
- American Society for Microbiology
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