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Ramaiah University of Applied Sciences

Dr Chetana Baliga

Dr. Chetana Baliga

DBT-Ramalingaswami Fellow

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

  • MSc (Biotechnology)

    Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay

  • BSc (Biotechnology)

    BMS College for Women, Bangalore

Experience

Total Years of Experience: 16 years 

Academic: 16 years of research experience

Training Experience

Molecular biology techniques, protein biophysics, protein purification, protein interactions, library generation, high throughput phenotypic screening and deep mutational scanning

Antimicrobial peptides, Combating Antimicrobial resistance, Understanding protein sequence – structure- function relationships.

  1. 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. 2021 Mar 9;118(10):e2026465118. doi: 10.1073/pnas.2026465118 *Equal author contribution
  2. Mangano,K., Klepacki,D., Ohanmu, I., Baliga, C., Huang, W., Brakel, A., Krizsan, A., Polikanov, Y., Hoffmann, R., Vázquez-Laslop, N., and Mankin, A.S. (2023) ​‘Inhibition of translation termination by Drosocin, an antibacterial peptide from fruit flies’, Nat Chem Biol. 19, 1082 – 1090
  3. 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.
  4. Baliga, C., Selmke, B., Worobiew, I., Borbat, P., Sarma, S. P., Trommer, W. E., Varadarajan, R., and Aghera, N. (2019) ​‘CcdB at pH 4 Forms a Partially Unfolded State with a Dry Core’, Biophys J. 2019 Mar 5;116(5):807 – 817.
  5. Baliga, C., Majhi, S., Mondal, K., Bhattacharjee, A., VijayRaghavan, K., and Varadarajan, R. (2016) ​‘Rational elicitation of cold-sensitive phenotypes’, Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A 113, E2506-2515. Highlighted in the ​“In this Issue” section of PNAS. ​“Generating cold-sensitive mutants”. Proc Natl Acad Sci 2016 113 (18) 4877 – 4879
  6. Baliga, C., Varadarajan, R., and Aghera, N. (2016) ​‘Homodimeric Escherichia coli Toxin CcdB Folds via Parallel Pathways’, Biochemistry 55, 6019 – 6031
  7. Shukla, R. T., Baliga, C., and Sasidhar, Y. U. (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.
  8. Bajaj, K., Dewan, P. C., Chakrabarti, P., Goswami, D., Barua, B., Baliga, C., and Varadarajan, R. (2008) ​‘Structural correlates of the temperature sensitive phenotype derived from saturation mutagenesis studies of CcdB’, Biochemistry 47, 12964 – 12973.

  • Awarded the DBT-Ramalingaswami re-entry fellowship (DBT-RRF) in the year 2022 – 23
  • 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.