Umakant Waman Kenkare

Biography

Umakant Waman Kenkare earned his BSc (1949) and MSc (by research) in Biochemistry (1952). He did his PhD on "Studies in Folic Acid Metabolism" under the guidance of Professor BM Braganza from Bombay University. Subsequently, he went to USA to join Professor SP Colowick of the Vanderbilt University for post-doctoral training. He, along with Colowick, demonstrated the complete reversibility of protein denaturation and its importance for showing the primacy of protein sequence for 3-D structure of a protein. In 1963, Kenkare joined Professor FM Richards at Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut and established that ribonuclease S had the same structure in solution and in crystalline states, and that the active site histidyl residues 12 and 119 had only a catalytic role and no structural role. On return to India (1965), Kenkare joined the Molecular Biology unit of Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR). He retired from TIFR (1987) and shifted initially to Delhi University South Campus and thereafter to National Tissue Culture Facility in Pune as a CSIR Emeritus Scientist.

Research Interest

Molecular Enzymology, Structural Biochemistry, Molecular Biology