Dr Vidya Darbari

Undergraduate Teaching

• Practical Molecular and Cellular Biology (BIO190)
• Practical Biochemistry (BIO198)
• Biochemistry Communication I (BIO201)
• Biochemistry Communication II (BIO301)
• Techniques for Biological and Chemical Sciences (BIO269)
• Advanced Biochemical Research Methods (BIO491)
• Protein Structure, Folding and Assemblies (BIO367)

Research

Research Interests:

Research in our group aims to gain a molecular understanding of how virulence proteins in pathogenic bacteria cause disease. Main focus in the group is on mycobacterial membrane proteins that play a role in fatty acid/cholesterol import for survival during chronic infection. Our group also works on the computational structural biology of Type IV secretion system which is involved in nucleoprotein transport for conjugation and virulence protein release.

Our group employs various structural biology (X-ray Crystallography, TEM), biochemical, biophysical and cell biology techniques for structural and functional characterisation. The current focus is on the structural and functional characterisation of the cholesterol importer proteins in Mycobacteria with specific focus on the Mce4 proteins. We are trying to understand how the various Mce4 proteins come together to form a membrane spanning assembly, how they import cholesterol, downstream interactions with cholesterol metabolising proteins, immune evasion strategies and host-pathogen interactions facilitated by the Mce proteins.

Research department

• Biochemistry

Publications

• Browse a list of publications by Vidya Darbari

Supervision

PhD supervision

• Xiaowei Dong
• Joshua Kaplan