DrSrinjan Basu

Srinjan Basu is a Lecturer in Cell and Developmental Biology within the Department of Life Sciences. His lab provides a single-molecule perspective of the cell nucleus during mammalian embryo development.

BIOGRAPHY:
Srinjan is interested in how molecules in a cell come together to determine how the cell responds to a signal, how they make decisions about what to become in the early embryo and how these processes are dysregulated in disease. He first became interested in these questions during his undergraduate Natural Sciences degree at the University of Cambridge where he studied a mixture of biology, chemistry and physics. He then pursued a Molecular, Cellular and Chemical Biology PhD at Harvard University, where he developed Raman-based label-free imaging and single-molecule imaging to track molecular changes within the nucleus of a mammalian cell. During his postdoc, he continued to established methods that reveal DNA folding and the dynamics of chromatin binding proteins at single-molecule and single-cell resolution. These approaches included single-cell Hi-C, 3D live-cell single-molecule imaging and live-cell single-molecule FRET. He then set up his lab at the University of Cambridge before moving to Imperial College London. His lab now uses single-molecule and single-cell approaches to study how cells differentiate in the early mammalian embryo but also how these differentiation processes are dysregulated in developmental disorders.

RESEARCH INTERESTS:

1. Technology development: Establishing single-molecule imaging approaches to track nuclear proteins (transcription factors and chromatin-modifying enzymes), enhancer-promoter dynamics and transcription in live mammalian cells and tissues.

2. Basic biology: Combining single-molecule imaging and single-cell next-generation sequencing of pluripotent stem cells, organoids and mouse embryos to determine how pluripotent cells differentiate in the early mammalian embryo.

3. Insights into disease: Combining single-molecule imaging and single-cell next-generation sequencing to determine how chromatin regulators and misfolding of the 3D genome influence developmental disorders such as cancer or epilepsy.