Divya Nayar
IIT, Delhi
Divya Nayar is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at Indian Institute of Technology Delhi. She holds a Ph.D. in Computational Chemistry from Indian Institute of Technology Delhi. Her research interests lie in soft matter simulations with a focus to obtain a fundamental understanding of the biomolecular self-assembly and employing the understanding to design bio-inspired nanomaterials with tailored applications. She was a postdoctoral associate at Technische Universitaet Darmstadt, Germany. She also worked as Assistant Professor at IIT Kharagpur at the Center for Computational and Data Sciences prior to joining IIT Delhi. Along with her research work, she is also passionate about encouraging young women to pursue career in STEM. She has been the initiator and Coordinator of the STEM Mentorship Program for High School Girls at IIT Delhi as part of the Academic Outreach activities.
Session 1C: Lectures by Fellows/Associates
Chairperson: Vijayamohanan Pillai, IISER Tirupati, Tirupati
Molecular crowding: Biomolecular processes to nanomaterials design
One of the prominent features of the living cell environment is that it is crowded with tightly packed macromolecules, small co-solutes, ions and has restricted water. Biomolecules evolve and function inside this milieu. This tight packing exerts crowding effects that are expected to crucially modulate biomolecular structure and dynamics. A comprehensive understanding of these effects remains elusive, since these effects have remained under-appreciated due to complexities associated with investigating concentrated environments. There are two schools of thought. The traditional understanding highlights that the crowded milieu induces compaction in biomolecules via entropic effects due to the volume exclusion effects of macromolecular crowders. The new view highlights that the biomolecular collapse may be either promoted or opposed where the soft interactions can play a crucial role. Moreover, crowding can be an attractive tool to design functional nanomaterials. Crowding can be employed to control molecular self-assembly for designing nanomaterials with tuneable properties in therapeutics. The talk will discuss microscopic mechanisms that shed light into the emerging view of crowding effects on biomolecular self-assembly and solvation. Additionally, the talk will discuss how the gap between biomolecular and nanomaterial self-assembly can be bridged by using intracellular crowding as a tool using computer simulations.