Rajesh Ranjan

Rajesh Ranjan
Johns Hopkins University, USA

Biography

He is a post-doctorate fellow at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, USA. His post-doctoral research focused on asymmetric cell division in Drosophila male germline stem cell and understanding cellular differentiation and epigenetic regulation in cell fate determination during development. He is using high-end technologies to date to understand cell fate determination in germline stem cells, such as high-resolution live imaging, super-resolution fix imaging and CRISPR/Cas9 to tag genomic loci. He received his Ph.D. award under Dr. Paul S. Maddox in Molecular and Cellular Biology from University of Montreal, Montreal, Canada. His doctoral research focused on chromatin dynamics during mitosis in C. elegans. He worked as a junior research fellow (JRF) at National Institute for Immunology (NII), New Delhi, India. His JRF research focused on HIV-1 in functional characterization of Tat protein using human cell lines. He received Master degree in Biotechnology from Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi, India. His master research was focused on p53 binding protein 1 (p53BP1), functional characterization and biophysical analysis of p53BP1.

Research Interest

The processes of DNA replication and cell division allow the genetic material of a cell to be duplicated and transferred faithfully to its daughter cells. However, if DNA replication and cell division were always carried out in a symmetric manner, it would lead in a cluster of tumor cells instead of a multicellular organism. Therefore, understanding of any complex living organism depends on learning how cells become different during cell division while faithfully maintaining the same genetic material. It is well recognized that the distinct epigenetic information of a cell type defines its unique gene expression pattern. Nevertheless, how epigenetic information contained in the parental cell is either maintained or changed during cell division and faithfully transferred into the daughter cells remains largely unknown. My primary goal is to understand how differential epigenome generated on sister chromatids in stem cell and how mitotic machinery distinguishes them during mitosis for cell fate determination.