Chemical Ecology: Natural Products Chemistry Strikes Back

Abstract : Communication in biology between organisms is largely mediated by chemicals. Coexistence of organisms and antagonism are determined by the nature of chemical interactions. This talk highlights the remarkable chemical diversity that is encountered in biology and emphasizes the importance of sensitive, high resolution analysis of complex mixtures of natural products. The specific example of marine cone snail venom will be used to illustrate the role of mass spectrometry and next generation sequencing in deconvoluting complex natural peptide libraries.

About the Speaker : Professor Padmanabhan Balaram obtained his B.Sc. (1967) from Poona University, M.Sc. (1969) from Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Kanpur and Ph.D. (1972) in chemistry from the Carnegie-Mellon University, USA. He worked as a Research Associate at the Harvard University (1972-73) with Prof. RB Woodward of the Department of Chemistry. On return to India, he joined the Indian Institute of Science (IISc.), Bangalore as a Lecturer (1973), and then became Assistant Professor (1977), Associate Professor (1982) and finally a Professor in 1986. He was Director of the Institute from 2005-2014.

He has contributed extensively to the area of molecular biophysics and chemical biology in a career spread over four decades. As the Editor of Current Science from 1995 to 2013 he authored over 300 editorials on a wide range of topics of interest to the scientific community in India. He has been associated with a number of advisory bodies of the government .

Professor Balaram is a recipient of several awards and honours, including Padma Shri (2002); Padma Bhushan (2014). He is a Fellow of Indian Academy of Science, Bangalore; INSA, New Delhi and the Academy of Sciences for the Developing World (TWAS).