Shraddha Basu, PhD

I work in the Preclinical and Clinical trial of Laboratory of Adjuvants and Antigens Research of the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research (WRAIR) in support of the U.S. Military HIV Research Program (MHRP). Here I work on surface plasmon resonance (SPR) (using Biacore), and Miscroscale thermophoresis (MST) to determine the binding interactions and kinetics of the broadly neutralizing antibodies with the HIV-1 Envelope protein. Using the Circular Dichroism (CD), I look at the structural conformational changes of the HIV-1 Envelope protein in presence or absence of adjuvant. Using SPR, I determine the avidity of the polyclonal antibodies produced in the nonhuman primates and human against the Envelope protein of the HIV-1 along with different formulations of ALF.

I did my PhD in Biochemistry from Department of Chemistry & Biochemistry, South Dakota State University, USA. I worked in Protein chemistry, Structural biology and Biophysics and I was associated with multiple projects related to structural and functional characterization of cancer-related proteins. I made recombinant proteins (By Molecular Cloning), analyze their structures and searching out the outcomes of what if it is mutated or overly expressed and how mutations affect the functions and stability of the proteins. Through mutagenesis, we manipulated the structure of the proteins and purify them by affinity chromatography followed by Size exclusion chromatography (FPLC) in order to pursue thermodynamic studies by Isothermal Titration Calorimetry (ITC). We also looked at the molecular structure and stability of those proteins by Nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR), Circular dichroism (CD), and Fast parallel protein proteolysis (FASTpp) analysis. NMR- T1, T2, & Het-NoE experiments were being performed to determine the contribution of the mutations in the dynamic motion of the protein.