Professor and Sonu Agrawal Memorial Chair, IIT Kanpur Senior Fellow, DBT Wellcome Trust India Alliance नमस्ते सदा वत्सले मातृभूमे I

India
We are on the cover page😎!!! @IITKanpur @MolecularCell
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Great to have @TohokuSeika visiting us at @IITKanpur !!!
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That's our wonderful colleague @nitiniitk @IITKanpur !!!
In 2000, he was All India Rank 1 in IIT-JEE. He took Computer Science at IIT Kanpur and finished the degree. Then he left computing altogether and today he studies the brains of mosquitoes. His name is Nitin Gupta. He graduated in 2004 with a BTech in computer science and an interest in biology that had been quietly growing through his undergraduate years. He went to the University of California, San Diego for a PhD in bioinformatics and systems biology, finishing in 2009. Then he spent a few months in a cognitive neuroscience lab there, using magnetic stimulation to study how urges for food and money leak into the motor system before a person actually moves. From 2010 to 2014 he was at the National Institutes of Health, in a laboratory studying sensory coding, learning electrophysiology. Recording the electrical conversation between neurons, one spike at a time. In July 2014, he came back to IIT Kanpur as faculty in Biological Sciences and Bioengineering. His lab asks a question that sounds simple and is not. How does a brain decide that something is worth moving towards, or running away from, without ever having learned it? They use smell, and they use insects. Grasshoppers, flies and mosquitoes. A mosquito finds you largely by carbon dioxide, picked up by sensory neurons on its maxillary palps and carried into a region of its brain called the antennal lobe. Gupta's lab works on how those circuits weigh a human body against a repellent, and how that computation becomes a decision to approach or turn away. His group also built TreadWill, a free, fully automated cognitive behavioural therapy programme for depression, designed for people in countries where therapists are scarce. In a randomised trial with 598 participants in India, users who completed at least half the modules showed significant reductions in depression and anxiety symptoms. Of the twenty students who topped IIT-JEE between 2000 and 2019, twelve now work outside India. He is not one of them. "I always knew I had to return. Movies like Swades inspired me."
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“You have to focus all the energy you have to spend, to seek out, ‘What next? What I can do?’” said medicine laureate Katalin Karikó. Learn more about her inspirational approach to work: nobelprize.org/prizes/medici…
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Did you miss our Nobel Prize Dialogue this weekend? We brought together a group of Nobel Prize laureates, experts and students to discuss AI's impact on the future of science in Seoul South Korea. Watch the full event here: nobelprize.org/events/nobel-…
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"To make a discovery is rewarding but what is even more exciting is to share the discovery with others. To tell someone – look what I found, what is past those mountains, what is across those oceans. That is what is so rewarding with science, it is wonderful to be part of the scientific community." During a lecture in Busan, South Korea, Nobel Prize laureate Craig Mello shared what he enjoys the most about scientific discoveries. Watch our full event in South Korea: piped.video/watch?v=vSfL5fi-…
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BindCraft2 is out — and they’re not waiting for the paper. The full code drops today, free for academic and industry use. More modalities, more biological constraints, and a much broader protein binder design workflow — released early so teams can use it immediately in the current Adaptyv competition. Protein design is moving fast from “publish the model” to “ship the code and test it in the wet lab.” github.com/PacesaLab/BindCra…
ʙɪɴᴅᴄʀᴀꜰᴛ2 is out, and we're not waiting for the paper. The full code drops today, free for academic and industry use. We're releasing it early so you can start designing right now, and bring its full power to the current Adaptyv competition. github.com/PacesaLab/BindCra…
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"I loved math when I was growing up. Nobody in my family was a scientist, but my father loved doing puzzles. So we did a lot of puzzles." Read about how chemistry laureate Jennifer Doudna's scientific journey started: bit.ly/2M82Chu
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"When you fail, be obstinate... never give up." Get some valuable career advice from our 2023 Nobel Prize laureates Katalin Karikó, Claudia Goldin and Anne L'Huillier.
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🏅第31回慶應医学賞受賞者決定🏅 小川誠司博士 F. Ulrich Hartl博士 本賞は医学・生命科学の領域において顕著かつ創造的な業績を挙げ、今後も活躍が期待される研究者を顕彰する制度です。本賞受賞者から #ノーベル賞 受賞者を13名輩出しています。 ms-fund.keio.ac.jp/prize/
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The look of someone who woke up to good news! In 2021, Ardem Patapoutian got an early morning shock after learning he received the medicine prize. Here he is a little bit later, watching the press conference with his son, Luca. Who will wake up to good news this year? Photo: Nancy Hong
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“The story of how orexin, a neuropeptide that maintains wakefulness, was identified and implicated in narcolepsy is no yawner,” Rita Rubin reports in @JAMA_current. Read how the 2026 Basic Medical Research #LaskerAward winners identified the brain peptide orexin and elucidated its role in narcolepsy: ow.ly/2nJp50ZNAvT
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Scientists have determined the highest-resolution protein structure obtained to date. Using advanced X-ray crystallography at EMBL Hamburg's P14 beamline, the team solved the structure of an archaeal protein at an astonishing 0.43 Ångström resolution. embl.org/news/science-techno…
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2024 #NobelPrize laureate in chemistry David Baker succeeded with the almost impossible feat of building entirely new kinds of proteins. In recent years, one incredible protein creation after the other has emerged from Baker’s laboratory. They range from new nanomaterials where up to 120 proteins spontaneously link together (see animation) to proteins that function as a type of molecular rotor. Who will be awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry this year? We will find out on 7 October. Animation: ©Terezia Kovalova/The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences
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Irène Joliot-Curie was a battlefield radiologist, activist, politician, and daughter of two of the most famous scientists in the world: Marie Skłodowska and Pierre Curie. Discover her journey to her own Nobel Prize: bit.ly/2D7FAzk
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The Suzuki reaction is named after chemist Akira Suzuki, who was awarded the chemistry prize in 2010. Chemists use Suzuki couplings to join carbon atoms together – they have been used to create polymers that emit light and to develop light-capturing molecules.
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A genome-rewriting approach known as adenine base editing offers a precise way to investigate gene function in early human embryos go.nature.com/3SYHBYQ
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“It takes a bunch of different brains, all working on it together, for sure!” Scientific discovery rarely happens overnight. In this episode of our podcast – Nobel Prize Conversations – Mary Brunkow describes the patience, persistence and collaboration necessary to decode the immune system. Host Adam Smith also speaks with Brunkow's co-laureates Fred Ramsdell and Shimon Sakaguchi about their discoveries concerning peripheral immune tolerance. Listen to this episode with the 2025 medicine laureates: linktr.ee/nobelprizeconversa…
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