Karthik Raman

I am presently an Assistant Professor at the Department of Biotechnology, at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras.

Academic

Research Interests

My primary research interests are in computational systems biology, particularly the modelling and simulation of complex systems and networks. Presently, I am quite interested in understanding the design principles of biological systems through multi-scale computational modelling/theoretical studies, and how a knowledge of these principles can be exploited in applications such as synthetic biology. I am also interested in the application of complex network science to various disciplines, in and outside biology.

My PhD involved the modelling and simulation of (myco)bacterial metabolism, metabolic networks and protein--protein interactions, to identify better drug targets for tuberculosis. I have also modelled of the human immune system and its interaction with mycobacteria. During my post-doc, I have studied the robustness and evolvability of biological systems (TOR signalling), as well as artificial systems (programmable hardware).

Post-doctoral Research

I completed my post-doctoral research at the Department of Biochemistry, University of Zurich, in the lab of Prof. Andreas Wagner. My research mainly concerned the analysis of the evolvability and robustness of biological networks, particularly yeast signal transduction networks. I have also looked at the robustness and evolvability of an artificial system, namely programmable hardware.

PhD Thesis

Systems-level Modelling and Simulation of Mycobacterium tuberculosis: Insights for Drug Discovery
(submitted, October 2008)
Research Supervisor: Dr. Nagasuma Chandra
Supercomputer Education and Research Centre/Bioinformatics Centre, Indian Institute of Science

Publications

• Karthik Raman and Nagasuma Chandra (2011) "Systems Biology of tuberculosis: Insights for drug discovery", In: W. Dubitzky, J Southgate and H. Fuss (editors), In:Understanding the Dynamics of Biological Systems: Lessons Learned from Integrative Systems Biology (Chapter 5, pages 83-110), Springer ISBN 9781441979636
  PDF DOI:10.1007/978-1-4419-7964-3_5
• Karthik Raman and Andreas Wagner (2011) "Evolvability and robustness in a complex signalling circuit" Molecular BioSystems 7:1081-1092
  PMID 21225054 PDF DOI:10.1039/C0MB00165A
• Karthik Raman and Andreas Wagner (2011) "The evolvability of programmable hardware" Journal of the Royal Society Interface 8:269-281
  PMID 20534598 PDF DOI:10.1098/rsif.2010.0212
• Karthik Raman (2010) "Construction and analysis of protein-protein interaction networks" Automated Experimentation 2:2
  PMID 20334628 PDF DOI:10.1186/1759-4499-2-2
• Karthik Raman and Nagasuma Chandra (2010) "Systems Biology" Resonance 15:131--153
  PDF DOI:10.1007/s12045-010-0015-7
• Karthik Raman, Ashwini Gurudas Bhat and Nagasuma Chandra (2010) "A systems perspective of host–pathogen interactions: predicting disease outcome in tuberculosis" Molecular BioSystems 6:516-530
  PMID 20174680 PDF DOI:10.1039/b912129c
• Karthik Raman, Rohit Vashisht and Nagasuma Chandra (2009) "Strategies for efficient disruption of metabolism in Mycobacterium tuberculosis from network analysis" Molecular BioSystems 5:1740-1751
  PMID 19593474 PDF DOI:10.1039/b905817f
• Karthik Raman, Nagasuma Chandra (2009) "Flux balance analysis of biological systems: applications and challenges " Briefings in Bioinformatics 10:435—449
  PMID 19287049 DOI:10.1093/bib/bbp011
• Karthik Raman, Nagasuma Chandra (2008) "Mycobacterium tuberculosis interactome analysis unravels potential pathways to drug resistance" BMC Microbiology 8:234
  PMID 19105810 DOI:10.1186/1471-2180-8-234
• Karthik Raman, Yeturu Kalidas and Nagasuma Chandra (2008) "targetTB: A target identification pipeline for Mycobacterium tuberculosis through an interactome, reactome and genome-scale structural analysis" BMC Systems Biology 2:109
  PMID 19099550 DOI: 10.1186/1752-0509-2-109
• Karthik Raman, Yeturu Kalidas and Nagasuma Chandra (2007) "Model Driven Drug Discovery: Principles and Practices", In: Biological Database Modeling, Artech House ISBN 1596932589
• Ketki Verkhedkar, Karthik Raman, Nagasuma Chandra and Saraswathi Vishveshwara (2007) "Metabolome based reaction graphs of M. tuberculosis and M. leprae: A comparative network analysis" PLoS ONE 2(9):e881
  PMID 17849010 PDF DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0000881
• Karthik Raman, Preethi Rajagopalan and Nagasuma Chandra (2007) "Hallmarks of Mycolic Acid Biosynthesis: A Comparative Genomics Study" Proteins: Structure, Function and Bioinformatics 69(2):358–368.
  PMID 17600834 PDF DOI: 10.1002/prot.21591
• Karthik Raman, Preethi Rajagopalan and Nagasuma Chandra (2006) "Principles and Practices of Pathway Modelling" Current Bioinformatics 1(2):147—160
  Abstract
• Karthik Raman, Preethi Rajagopalan and Nagasuma Chandra (2005) "Flux Balance Analysis of Mycobacterium tuberculosis: targets for anti-tubercular drugs" PLoS Computational Biology 1(5):e46
  PMID 16261191 PDF DOI: 10.1371/journal.pcbi.0010046

Conferences

• Presentation on "targetTB: A drug target validation tool for tuberculosis" at the conference on Computational Insights into Biological Systems, Bangalore, India (2006)
• Presented a poster on "PathwayAnalyser: A Systems Biology Tool for Flux Analysis of Metabolic Pathways" at the 5th International Conference on Bioinformatics, New Delhi, India (2006)
• Presentation on "Flux Annotations in SBML" at the 11th Systems Biology Markup Language (SBML) Forum, Tokyo, Japan (2006)
• Presentation on "Pathway Analyser -- for FBA/MoMA analyses of metabolic pathways" at the 11th Systems Biology Markup Language (SBML) Forum, Tokyo, Japan (2006)
• Presented a poster on "Protein--protein influences in Saccharomyces cerevisiae" at the 7th International Conference on Systems Biology, Yokohama, Japan (2006)
• Presented a poster on "Drug Target Identification for Tuberculosis: A Systems Approach" at IBC Asia's International Conference on Drug Discovery to Clinical Trials, Mumbai, India (2005)
• Participated in the 3rd SBML Hackathon at Tokyo, Japan (2005)
• Presented a poster on “A Systems Study of the computational pharmacology of H2 Anti-histamines” at the Young Bioinformaticians' Forum 2004, Oxford, United Kingdom (2004)
• Presentation on “Merging and Visualisation of SBML Models” at the 9th Systems Biology Markup Language (SBML) Forum, Heidelberg, Germany
• Presented a review on “DNA Analytical Methods for Detection of Transgenic Organisms” at Anna University, Chennai on the event of Biotechcellence 2003, a national-level symposium on biotechnology (2003)

Personal

Bio

I did my schooling in DAV Boys Senior Secondary School, Chennai. I graduated from UDCT (University of Mumbai, Department of Chemical Technology) in 1999, with a bachelor's degree in Chemical Technology and joined IISc in 2003, for a Masters in Computational Science. In 2005, I successfully applied for an upgrade to the PhD programme, to pursue a PhD thesis in Systems Biology, with Dr Nagasuma Chandra and Prof Saraswathi Vishveshwara as my advisors. I submitted my PhD thesis in October 2008, and moved to the lab of Prof. Andreas Wagner, Department of Biochemistry, University of Zurich, for a postdoc. My post-doctoral research involved the study of the evolvability and robustness of biological networks. In April 2011, I joined the Department of Biotechnology, Indian Institute of Technology Madras, as an Assistant Professor.

Contact

KARTHIK RAMAN
BT 104 Bhupat and Jyoti Mehta School of Biosciences
Indian Institute of Technology Madras
Chennai 600 036
INDIA

Contact Numbers:

• +91-44-2257-4139 (BT 104, IIT Madras)

E-Mail: id=kraman AT server=iitm dot ac dot in
Blog: http://karthikr.wordpress.com/
LinkedIn: Public Profile
Other websites: StotraSamhita