| Dr Salil Kumar Bose
Senior Lecturer
Division of Structural Biology & Biochemistry
School of Biological Sciences
College of Science
Email: SKBOSE@ntu.edu.sg
Phone: (+65)63162807
Office: SBS-01n-07 |
| Education |
- PhD University of Rochester 1975
- MS University of Rochester 1974
- MSc(Physics) Jadavpur University 1965
- BSc(Hons) Calcutta University 1959
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| Biography |
Prof Salil Bose is currently in the School of Biological Sciences since July 2002. He also has joint appointment with the School of Computer Engineering. Before coming to NTU, Prof Bose was a senior scientist at NIH (National Institutes of Health, USA) for 12 years, and professor & chairman in the School of Biotechnology in JNU (Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi) for 5 years. As visiting scientist he worked for 6 years in institutions like Stanford and Berkeley in California, Washington University St Louis, University of Illinois at Urbana, and Imperial College in London.
His research interest includes cellular bioenergetics of chloroplasts and mitochondria. He has published over 100 peer-reviewed research papers in international journals. Currently (2008 – 2010) he has been working in collaboration with Hue University (Vietnam) on extracellular enzymes secreted by Bacillus subtillis. Prof Bose has been appointed as a Visiting Professor for the year 2008 by the Kyungpook National University of South Korea. Prof Bose is a member of the National Academy of Sciences New York. |
| Research Interests |
Energy production and consumption inside a biological cell occurs under a very finely regulated manner. The focus of my research is the understanding of the regulatory network in the heart that controls the flow of energy. This includes the delivery of oxygen and metabolic substrates from the blood, to the energy conversion processes in the cell, to the actual muscle contraction and ion transport associated with the pumping of blood. Because mitochondria are the `powerhouse? of energy production, a major effort is put in determining the cellular factors that control and balance the interaction between the production of ATP and its utilization. This is being accomplished at the level of intact heart cells as well as isolated organelles and proteins using various biochemical and biophysical techniques. We are currently working on the mechanisms that calcium and phosphate can regulate muscle energy metabolism in mitochondria in the intact heart cells.
I have studied how sunlight is utilized by bacteria, Halobacterium salinarium, to produce electro-chemical energy that is used to make ATP. This energy conversion in the cell is accomplished by a membrane protein called bacteriorhodopsin. This protein is excited by absorption of light and then undergoes a series of conformational changes within a short time of few milliseconds before returning back to the starting unexcited state. This process, called photocycle, is energetically coupled in transporting protons across the bacterial membrane. Using flash photolysis technique I study the kinetics of photocycle in relation to its regulation through interaction between bacteriorhodopsin protein and the neighboring lipids. |