Prof. Manju Bansal
Prof. Bansal received her Ph.D. from Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore in
1977. She joined European Molecular Biology Laboratory, Heidelberg, FRG as a von
Humboldt fellow in 1981. She joined Indian Institute of Science as lecturer in
1982. She was director of Institute of Bioinformatics and Applied Biotechnology
from 2001-2004. Currently she is Prof of theoretical Biophysics group in
Molecular Biophysics Unit in Indian Institute of Science.
Field of
work
The main thrust of research is directed towards arriving
at a better understanding of the sequence dependent variability in DNA
structure and its role in biological function. Her work clearly showed for the
first time that the intrinsic sequence dependent variability in DNA
structure, as observed in oligonucleotide crystal structures, can
correctly predict intrinsic curvature and bending of DNA molecules in
solution, which is now well known to play a decisive role in such important
functions as transcription initiation and replication. She has adopted a
multipronged approach including model-building, molecular mechanics and
physico chemical techniques. The studies have provided insights into local
variability of DNA structures and in order to describe these structural
features, several new analytical tools have been developed
in-house. Several predictions made by these theoretical considerations have
been experimentally confirmed. Recently a promoter identification algorithm
based on DNA stability has been developed, which predicts prokaryotic
promoters with better accuracy than most currently used programs.
