Dr Sujith Puthiyaveetil
Leverhulme Early Career Fellow
- Room: 5.01F, Fogg building
- Telephone: +44 (0)20 7882 7011
- Email: s.puthiyaveetil("at" sign)qmul.ac.uk
Research interests:
Signalling and gene regulation by chloroplast two-component systems
Two-component systems, comprising sensor histidine kinases and response regulators, are an ancient family of signal transduction proteins found predominantly in bacteria. These signalling systems enable bacteria to sense and respond to changes in external and internal environmental conditions. Once thought to be unique to prokaryotes, two-component systems are now also found in eukaryotes, and recently, in their energy-converting organelles – chloroplasts. Chloroplasts, descendants of endosymbiotic cyanobacteria, are the sites of photosynthesis in plants and algae. Chloroplasts employ two-component systems, retained from their bacterial ancestors, to connect photosynthetic electron transport to chloroplast gene transcription. Chloroplast two-component systems have been rewired in evolution as a result of natural selection and evolutionary tinkering. My research aims to map the functional partners in chloroplast two-component systems, describe their signal transduction properties in molecular detail, and unravel their evolutionary significance.