Pune: Kayarat Saikrishnan of the biology department at Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISER) has received the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar award for his research work.
He is one among 12 scientists across the country, who is a recipient of the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for Science and Technology 2019. The award is given annually by the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) to scientists to recognise their notable and outstanding research, applied or fundamental, in different streams like biology, chemistry, environmental science, engineering, mathematics, medicine and physics.
The 43-year-old scientist from Kerala has received the award for his work in fundamental biology, specifically in the area of structural biology used to research on restriction-modification enzyme systems.
“My research was based on understanding the behaviour of enzymes and how it works in the bacterial defence system. Just like viruses attack the human body, there are special viruses, which attack bacteria. To prevent them, there were molecules in bacterial cells, which work against the virus,” said Saikrishnan.
Further explaining, he said, “These molecules are proteinous in nature and we were studying how these protein molecules work. To do this, we were using structural biology, biophysics and biochemistry.”
Saikrishnan stated that this award is one of the most accredited awards and holds a lot of importance. Speaking about the research, he stated that the restriction-modification system was covered long back in the 1960s. However, their structure, which is an integral component to understand how enzymes work, has never been successfully cracked.
The primary reason why it wasn’t successful until now was because of the large size of molecules. “When I say large size, it is the mass of the protein molecules, which is huge and complex. The mass of the protein itself is made of various protein components. People have been successful in determining small parts of the protein structure but no one has so far determined the entire structure of the molecule,” said Saikrishnan.
“But this restriction-modification enzyme can be a very good drug target for prevention. They can modulate antibiotic resistance The scientists or researcher in the fields of pharmaceutical or medicine can take it forward in the future,” added Saikrishnan.
