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Departmental homepageDr Sawarkar studied Microbiology and Biochemistry in Mumbai and obtained his PhD in 2010 from the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. He then moved to the Department of Biosystems Science and Engineering of ETH-Zürich as a postdoctoral fellow. In 2014 he started his own independent group at the Max Planck Institute of Immunobiology and Epigenetics in Freiburg, before moving to the MRC, Cambridge, in 2019. He received the ERC Consolidator Grant in 2018 and Alfred Tissières Young Investigator Award in 2019.
At St John's College, Dr Sawarkar supervises first-year Medicine and Veterinary Sciences students for MIMS (Molecules in Medical Sciences). In the University, he contributes to the teaching of Part I (Biology of Cells), Part II (Biochemistry and Pharmacology) and Part III (Systems Biology).
Dr Sawarkar and his group are investigating the molecular mechanisms by which chromatin exerts control over stress response. They aim to address the following questions:
(1) Which cellular pathways sense environmental stress/ toxins and signal to the genome?
(2) How does chromatin interpret the information about cellular health and toxic exposure determining the transcriptional response to stress?
(3) How does the transcriptional response adapt cellular phenotypes to survive the stress?
Leone S, Srivastava A, Herrero-Ruiz A, Hummel B, Tittel L, Campalastri R, Aprile-Garcia F, Tan JH, Rawat P, Andersson P, Willis WE and Sawarkar R. HSP70 binds to specific non-coding RNA and regulates human RNA polymerase III. Mol Cell. 84(4), 687-701 (2024).
Rawat P, Boehning M, Hummel B, Aprile-Garcia F, Pandit AS, Eisenhardt N, Khavaran A, Niskanen E, Vos SM, Palvimo JJ, Pichler A, Cramer P and Sawarkar R. Stress-induced nuclear condensation of NELF drives transcriptional downregulation. Mol Cell. 81 (5), 1013-1026 (2021).
Aprile-Garcia F, Tomar P, Hummel B, Khavaran A and Sawarkar R. Nascent-protein ubiquitination is required for heat shock-induced gene downregulation in human cells. Nat Struct Mol Biol. 26(2):137-146 (2019).
Hummel B, Hansen EC, Yoveva A, Aprile-Garcia F, Hussong R and Sawarkar R. The evolutionary capacitor HSP90 buffers the regulatory effects of mammalian endogenous retroviruses. Nat Struct Mol Biol. 24, 234-242 (2017).
