Dr. Raghu Padinjat

Biography

Architecture of phosphoinositide signalling systems Our long-term scientific interest is to understand cellular communication mediated by lipid molecules generated by the metabolism of phosphatidylinositol. Phosphoinositide signals provide molecular control for key sub-cellular processes such as membrane remodelling, cytoskeletal function, transcription and translation. Through these processes, this signalling pathway orchestrates basic cellular behaviours such as cell division, shape changes, polarized movement and cell death and this plays a key role in a number of physiological processes including early embryogenesis, lymphocyte development and function as well as neuronal activity. The overall goal of our work is to understand how the architecture this signalling cascade is designed to optimally deliver physiological outputs.

Research Interest

We mainly use Drosophila as our model system; the goal is to discover key principles of signal transduction that are likely to be conserved during evolution but are experimentally more tractable in Drosophila. It is hoped that in the medium term, our analysis in Drosophila will inform studies of equivalent signalling pathways in mammalian models with more immediate biomedical relevance.