Mechanistic studies of regenerative medicine and nano-biology Regenerative medicine holds many promises and raises hope for patientswho do not have much choices beyond the current transplantation and rehabilitative options.

       One of the pillars of regenerative medicine are the multipotent stem cells that provide the myriad of possibilities of replacement tissues. We had earlier reported adipose tissue as a good source of these stem cells and showed osteogenic commitment from the petri dish to the animal. However, the transcriptional master switches that brings about the wonders of these adult stem cells remain elusive. Here we report how we arrive at and showed that ATF5 primes adipose stem cells to ostegenic lineage commitment. This opens up an exciting new area where by knowing and controlling the molecular switches, regenerative medicine can better take the differentiation "bull" by its "horn" and thereby control bone lineage commitment. A deviation from this, we are also interested in nanomaterials-biology. Nanomaterials have very useful chemical and physical properties and its prevalence in everyday consumer products can be surprising. However, its biological effects are still largely unknown with possible deleterious effects only apparent after a long period with chronic exposure and accumulation in body tissues. We focussed on metal oxide based nanomaterials like ZnO and TiO2 due to their high abundance and presense and studied their biological effects in cells.

     We found deleterious cell effects like activation of DNA damage genes and showed that cellular responses largely worked through p53, the key tumor suppressor. Cells without p53 tends to be resistant to large dose nanomaterials induced cell death and these nanomaterials induced stress may push these cells a step closer to malignancy.