Aneel Aggarwal
Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, NY·Biochemistry
Many essential jobs in a cell depend on proteins gripping DNA or RNA. Two examples are a bacterium fighting off a virus and a cell copying damaged DNA.
- Fields
Biochemistry
Biophysics
Microbiology & Immunology
- Topics
protein-nucleic acid interactions
structural biology
cryo-EM
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Aug 2029
What they work on
- Determine how the CBASS anti-phage system, which signals through cyclic oligonucleotides, becomes allosterically activated to trigger abortive infection and protect a bacterial population.
- Determine how a short prokaryotic Argonaute (pAgo) protein senses invading DNA and is switched on to cause abortive infection in bacteria.
- Use cryo-electron microscopy to solve the structure of the multi-subunit translesion DNA polymerase Polζ, an enzyme central to eukaryotic genome stability.
- Define how Polζ cooperates with the polymerase Rev1 to extend DNA synthesis from damaged DNA sites.
More about the research
The lab studies how proteins interact with nucleic acids in two such settings: how bacteria defend themselves against phages (viruses that infect bacteria), and how human-type (eukaryotic) cells copy DNA past damage. Both areas build on the group's long-running structural work on DNA-handling enzymes.
Why it matters
Cells face DNA damage every day, and bacteria are under constant attack from viruses. Knowing how the Polζ and Rev1 enzymes copy past DNA damage adds to understanding of how genomes stay stable. Knowing how CBASS and Argonaute defenses activate could inform future studies of bacterial immunity and of phages, the viruses that infect bacteria. The grants describe this as basic research into core cellular processes.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Nimrat Chatterjee
University of Vermont, VT·Biochemistry
Determine how the REV1 polymerase regulates autophagy and cellular metabolism, and how it steers cells toward autophagy or senescence after different types of DNA damage.
Scott Bailey
Johns Hopkins University, MD·Biochemistry
Determine how CRISPR-associated proteins use small guide RNAs to locate and destroy foreign DNA or RNA in prokaryotes, using cryo-EM structures together with biochemical, biophysical and cell-based assays.
Andrew Santiago-Frangos
University of Pennsylvania, PA·Biochemistry·Early-career
Find conserved DNA motifs in CRISPR leader sequences that may control spacer integration, transcription or RNA processing, using a bioinformatic search across CRISPR systems.
The school
Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai: 45 labs on PI Pages, $1.0B a year on research, 62 research doctorates a year.
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