Namasivayam Gautham (born 1955) is a retired
Professor Emeritus at the Centre of Advance Study in Crystallography and Biophysics,
University of Madras. He is known for his work on
DNA Crystallography,
protein structure prediction and
molecular docking
In the field of molecular modeling, docking is a method which predicts the preferred orientation of one molecule to a second when a ligand and a target are bound to each other to form a stable complex. Knowledge of the preferred orientation in tu ...
.
Education
In 1975, Gautham obtained his
BSc degree in physics from the
Madras Christian College
Madras Christian College (MCC) is a liberal arts and sciences college in Chennai, India. Founded in 1837, MCC is one of Asia's oldest extant colleges. The college is affiliated to the University of Madras but functions as an autonomous institu ...
,
University of Madras. Later, in 1979 he completed his
Master of Science degree in physics from
Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda. He was awarded a
PhD PHD or PhD may refer to:
* Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), an academic qualification
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* '' PhD: Phantasy Degree'', a Korean comic series
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** Ph.D. (Ph.D. albu ...
in 1983 for research on the
Structural biology of isopropylidene
nucleoside derivatives under the supervision of
Mysore A. Viswamitra.
Career and research
Gautham worked as a
Research associate at the
Indian Institute of Science. Following his
postdoctoral research, he was appointed as a lecturer at the
University of Madras in 1985. He was promoted to a full Professor in 1997. He continued to work at the University of Madras until his retirement in 2016.
Gautham used
DNA Crystallography to study the impact of metal ions on the transition of right-handed
B-DNA to left-handed
Z-DNA. as well as the self assembly of DNA decameric sequences into a four-way
Holliday junction
A Holliday junction is a branched nucleic acid structure that contains four double-stranded arms joined. These arms may adopt one of several conformations depending on buffer salt concentrations and the sequence of nucleobases closest to the ju ...
In the area of
structural bioinformatics
Structural bioinformatics is the branch of bioinformatics that is related to the analysis and prediction of the three-dimensional structure of biological macromolecules such as proteins, RNA, and DNA. It deals with generalizations about macromol ...
, Gautham developed a novel ''
Ab initio'' computational method using
Mutually Orthogonal Latin squares (MOLS) - a technique employed in the area of
experimental design - to efficiently sample the conformational space of polypeptides and proteins in order to identify global minimum energy conformations. Later, his laboratory applied the MOLS technique to the problem of molecular docking and produced an open source software package called MOLS.
Gautham has written two textbooks in the field of
Biophysics and
Bioinformatics
Bioinformatics () is an interdisciplinary field that develops methods and software tools for understanding biological data, in particular when the data sets are large and complex. As an interdisciplinary field of science, bioinformatics combi ...
. He holds two
patents for the development of computational methods for building optimal models of
3-dimensional molecular structures particularly related the
peptides and
proteins.
Gautham's research has been funded by the
Department of Science and Technology (DST), the
Department of Biotechnology
The Department of Biotechnology (DBT) is an Indian government department, under the Ministry of Science and Technology responsible for administrating development and commercialisation in the field of modern biology and biotechnology in India. It ...
and the
Council of Scientific and Industrial Research.
Awards and honours
Gautham was elected a Fellow of the
National Academy of Sciences, India (FNASc), India in 2007.
He was awarded the BOYSCAST Fellowship from DST, India in 1990. He received the Martin Foster Gold Medal in 1983 for Best Thesis in the Division of Physics and Mathematics by the
Indian Institute of Science.
See also
*
List of protein-ligand docking software
The number of notable protein-ligand docking programs currently available is high and has been steadily increasing over the last decades. The following list presents an overview of the most common notable programs, listed alphabetically, with ...
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Gautham, Namasivayam
Living people
Indian crystallographers
Indian bioinformaticians
1955 births
Indian Institute of Science alumni
Fellows of The National Academy of Sciences, India
20th-century Indian biologists
Tamil academics
Scientists from Chennai