The dynamic coupling between metabolic signaling and genome surveillance mechanisms

Kumar Somyajit currently works as a senior postdoc (Assistant professor) with Prof. Jiri Lukas at the Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Protein Research, University of Copenhagen. He graduated in 2015 from the lab of Dr. Ganesh Nagaraju at the Department of Biochemistry, IISc, Bangalore, India. The main focus of his research thus far has been to understand how cells protect themselves from replication-associated lesions that can lead to gradual accumulation of mutations and result in various disorders including cancer. His most recent study identified a signaling cascade that couples physiological fluctuations of metabolic pathways with the speed with which eukaryotic cells replicate their genomes. Importantly, cancer cells exploit this mechanism in order to survive under increased metabolic stress during oncogenic transformation. His ongoing work explores a previously unanticipated nascent DNA processing mechanism important to highly proliferative cells induced by hormones, during early embryonic growth, and during cancer progression. Utilizing state-of-the-art high content as well as high resolution protein imaging and biochemistry, Kumar aims to further investigate the greater implications of metabolic signaling, DNA replication, and genome stability.