Spectacular advances in molecular genetics are ushering in a new era in biology, in which the genetic blueprints of living organisms will become available in their entirety. This enormous amount of information will at first be largely incomprehensible, however, because of the great difficulty in relating information encoded in DNA to the molecular architectures and chemical transformations that underline the living system. The chemists and the biochemists at ACBR are interested to explore the biological systems including identifying and isolating the molecules involved in particular biological processes, determining their structures and properties, elucidating their function and designing interventions to modify that function. The ACBR laboratories will focus on genetic basis on human diseases, isolation of genes whose products regulate lipid metabolism, variations in several of these genes are linked to heart diseases, which is a common in India. The research in this laboratory is directed to understand the mechanism of DNA recombinant reactions.

An early step of homologous recombination is the DNA strand exchange reaction in which two homologous DNA molecules are synapsed and strands are exchanged. The strand exchange is an example of many enzyme reactions in which ATP is hydrolysed for no obvious reason. Exchange of DNA strands is an isoenergetic process and infact a nonhydrolysable ATP analog can support the strand exchange. Is the energy of ATP hydrolysis simply wasted? We believe not and therefore seeking the roles. Several possibilities including specificity, proof reading, etc. are being explored. Our laboratory has studied the potential role of anti metabolites in cancer therapy. Cytotoxic potency of (Ara C,5-FU) and (6-MP, 6-TG) were enhanced many folds by their facilitated incorporation into DNA due to biochemical modulation. Effects of 2-deoxy glucose, 2,4-dinitrophenol, isopropyl-b-thioglucoside and aminopterin on excision repair of DNA cyclobutanethymidine dimers in human lymphocytes activated by PHA have also been evaluated.