Lipases are enzymes which are widely used in the pharmaceutical and the food industry. They are used in the preparation of pure (single enantiomer) drugs and for the production of fats and oils. Use of these enzymes can play a role in transforming the Indian food and pharma industry into a "value-added" one. A lipase database has been completed provides a fairly complete survey of the publicly available information on lipases. The lipase project has the following subcomponents: (1) more efficient lipase production from known microorganisms (2) better lipase production by scanning for new and more efficient microorganisms (3) molecular dynamics simulations of the shared functional (hinge) domain in lipases (5) simulation and understanding biochemical networks to engineer bacteria for increasing secretion and efficiency of lipases (6) molecular biological techniques for improving lipase-associated strains (7) predicting critical folds and functional domains in lipases.
Determining the structure of a protein is important
in understanding its function and role in normal and disease states.
Experimental methods for protein structure determination are unable to
keep pace with the number of proteins being sequenced, leading to a
sequence structure gap. There is therefore an immediate need to
bridge this gap using other techniques.
Protein folding studies for structure prediction using
computational approaches is being carried out. To understand the
mechanism of protein folding, a knowledge base is being created from
protein crystallographic data available in the Protein Data Bank. Tripeptide inter
residue distances and their utilization in building rules for
protein structure prediction is being explored.
The Center has a Beowulf cluster for parallelized applications, such as molecular dynamics simulations and biochemical pathways
Publications