Manjula Reddy (born 1965) is an Indian bacterial geneticist. She is the chief scientist at the

Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology The Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology ( hi, कोशिकीय एवं आण्विक जीवविज्ञान केंद्र, IAST: ''Kośikīya evam āṇavik jīvavijñāna kendra'') or CCMB is an Indian fundamen ...

Hyderabad Hyderabad ( ; , ) is the capital and largest city of the Indian state of Telangana and the ''de jure'' capital of Andhra Pradesh. It occupies on the Deccan Plateau along the banks of the Musi River (India), Musi River, in the northern part ...

, India. In 2019, she won the Infosys Prize in Life Sciences for her work on bacterial cell wall structure and synthesis. She is a Fellow of the Telangana Academy of Sciences and the

Indian Academy of Sciences The Indian Academy of Sciences, Bangalore was founded by Indian Physicist and Nobel Laureate C. V. Raman, and was registered as a society on 24 April 1934. Inaugurated on 31 July 1934, it began with 65 founding fellows. The first general meet ...

Education and career

Manjula Reddy earned her PhD from the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology in 2002. She started her own lab at the institution in 2007.

Research

Manjula Reddy conducts research on bacterial

cell walls A cell wall is a structural layer surrounding some types of cells, just outside the cell membrane. It can be tough, flexible, and sometimes rigid. It provides the cell with both structural support and protection, and also acts as a filtering mech ...

. She identified a novel "spacemaker" enzyme encoded by the

open reading frame In molecular biology, open reading frames (ORFs) are defined as spans of DNA sequence between the start and stop codons. Usually, this is considered within a studied region of a prokaryotic DNA sequence, where only one of the six possible readin ...

called MepK in ''

Escherichia coli ''Escherichia coli'' (),Wells, J. C. (2000) Longman Pronunciation Dictionary. Harlow ngland Pearson Education Ltd. also known as ''E. coli'' (), is a Gram-negative, facultative anaerobic, rod-shaped, coliform bacterium of the genus ''Escher ...

.'' She found that this enzyme hydrolyses certain cross-links in

peptidoglycan Peptidoglycan or murein is a unique large macromolecule, a polysaccharide, consisting of sugars and amino acids that forms a mesh-like peptidoglycan layer outside the plasma membrane, the rigid cell wall (murein sacculus) characteristic of most ...

thereby allowing the bacterial cell wall to expand. She aims to develop novel antimicrobials that can target the

synthesis pathway. She uses the model organisms ''

Mycobacterium smegmatis ''Mycobacterium smegmatis'' is an acid-fast bacterial species in the phylum ''Actinomycetota'' and the genus ''Mycobacterium''. It is 3.0 to 5.0 µm long with a bacillus shape and can be stained by Ziehl–Neelsen method and the auramine-rh ...

'' and ''Escherechia coli''. She was part of the team of scientists who patented the process for identifying mutagens and anti-mutagens. This process was patented from 1999 to 2018 in the United States. The other scientists in the team were Jayaraman Gowrishankar and Shanti M. Bharatan.

Awards and honors

* Infosys Prize in Life Sciences (2019) * Fellow of the

(2020) * Fellow of the Telangana Academy of Sciences * Editorial board member of the

Journal of Bacteriology The ''Journal of Bacteriology'' is a biweekly peer-reviewed scientific journal established in 1916. It is published by the American Society for Microbiology and the editor in chief is George A. O'Toole (Dartmouth College). The journal is delayed o ...

Personal life

She has stated in an interview that her father, Mohan Reddy, and her mother were supportive of her career as a scientist. She is married to a cardiologist and has two sons.

Selected publications

* Chodisetti, Pavan Kumar, and Manjula Reddy. "Peptidoglycan hydrolase of an unusual cross-link cleavage specificity contributes to bacterial cell wall synthesis." ''Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences'' 116.16 (2019): 7825-7830. * Singh, Santosh Kumar, et al. "Regulated proteolysis of a cross-link–specific peptidoglycan hydrolase contributes to bacterial morphogenesis." ''Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences'' 112.35 (2015): 10956-10961. * Reddy, Manjula. "Role of FtsEX in cell division of Escherichia coli: viability of ftsEX mutants is dependent on functional SufI or high osmotic strength." ''Journal of bacteriology'' 189.1 (2007): 98-108.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Reddy, Manjula 1965 births Living people 21st-century Indian women scientists 21st-century Indian scientists Indian geneticists Fellows of the Indian Academy of Sciences University of Hyderabad alumni