Page 28 - CTB-1 10 May

28 PIONEERING A NEW FUTURE
L-R: Minister of Science and Technology Dr Harsh Vardhan taking a tour of the J.C. Bose Museum, 2015
Participants of the NMRS Silver Jubilee Short Term NMR School organized at the Darjeeling Campus, Bose Institute, 2018
Nobel Laureate Joachim Frank at the J.C. Bose Museum, 2020
Inset: The painting on the ceiling of the Heritage Lecture Hall designed by Nandalal Bose
President of India Ram Nath Kovind at the closing ceremony of the Centenary celebrations in 2017
of antibiotics on the metamorphosis of tadpoles, which he showed could be reversed by administering vitamin B12. In this work, he very correctly guessed the effect of gut microbiome on development; this was far ahead of the times when practically nothing was known about this area.
Dr De made epoch-making discoveries in his research involving Vibrio cholerae, the bacterium that causes the deadly cholera disease. His identification of the cholera exotoxin as the causative agent of the disease introduced a
new paradigm in cholera research, and his investigations on how cholera caused harm to humans led to the introduction of oral rehydration therapy that has saved millions of lives.
The research in biology at Bose Institute took shape under the directorship of BB Biswas, who initiated work on a biochemical system in mung
beans which acts as a phosphate storage system in seeds and utilizes them during germination. Working on the problem for almost two decades,
various details of this system were worked out leading to the identification of the enzymes associated in transferring phosphate groups. A
new metabolic cycle linking the metabolic pathway of the inositol phosphates during germination
of seed was proposed which explained many
aspects of germination that were not previously understood. Noteworthy work that followed
includes studies on multiplicity of eukaryotic RNA polymerases and their regulatory factors and the metabolism of inositol phosphates in plants. The latter work led to the identification of several
novel genes in the inositol metabolic pathway thus confirming the antiquity of the inositol biosynthetic pathway and its importance in stress regulation. Subsequently, the usefulness of these unique genes in the entire metabolic pathway for raising stress tolerant crop plants through transgenic technology was achieved. Similar biotechnological methodology was adopted for in overexpression of Bt or lectin genes isolated from various sources for imparting insect and aphid resistance in crop plants.
In its fifty years of association with the Department of Science and Technology, there
have been significant contributions in the field
of biology research at Bose Institute. These
include work in the fields of biochemistry of leaf movement in Mimosa, bacterial sugar transport, seed storage proteins, developmental regulation in bacteriophages lambda, chromosome transmission in the budding yeast, molecular genetics of E. histolytica, lysis-lysogeny switch in bacteriophage lambda, transcription regulation in E. coli, structure and interaction of tubulin with drugs, protein folding, analysis of protein structures to understand conformation, weak interactions and molecular recognition, structural aspects of ubiquitination,