Manoj Kumar Gupta, Ph.D.

I am currently a Postdoc Research Fellow at Carnegie Mellon University in the Mechanical Engineering Department. Prior to CMU, I have done a Postdoc from IISER-Tirupati, INDIA, (Aug. 2019 to 2021), and PhD (Aug. 2014 to Feb. 2020) from IISER-Pune, under the supervision of Krishna N. Ganesh.

Current Projects

Applying my experience in the field of synthetic nucleic acid moiety (PNA) to the development of nanostructures and mechanical biosensors.

Previous Experience

My doctoral research is mainly focused on a new and novel type of PNA structure termed “Bimodal-PNA”. These bm-PNA can hybridize with two cDNAs, one from the amide face and the other from triazole face leading to double duplex or ternary complex formation. During the course of these studies, I have gained thorough understanding of design and synthesis and optimization of bm-PNAs, solution and solid phase peptide synthesis. Thermal melting of duplex, triplex, double duplex of triplex, ternary complex, and tetrapexes, conformation analysis of the duplexes by CD, thermodynamic studies by ITC, supramolecular self-assembly of peptide biomaterials by FE-SEM.

Publications

1) PNA with Double Face: Homothymine-homocytosine bimodal Cα-PNA (bm-Cα-PNA) forms a double duplex of the bm-PNA2:DNA triplex. Manoj Kumar Gupta, Bharath Raj Madhanagopal, and Krishna N. Ganesh* (J. Org. Chem. 2021, 86, 414–428).

2) Structural design and synthesis of bm-PNAs that simultaneously binds two complementary DNAs to form fused double duplexes. Manoj Kumar Gupta, Bharath Raj Madhanagopal, Dhrubajyoti Datta, and Krishna N. Ganesh* (Org. Lett. 2020, 22 5255-5260).

3) Self-Assembly of diphenylalanine – peptide nucleic acid conjugates. Dhrubajyoti Datta*, Omshanker Tiwari, and Manoj Kumar Gupta (ACS Omega, 2019, 4, 10715-10728).

Awards & Funding

  • Doctoral fellowship from CSIR in NET conducted jointly by Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) and University Grants Commission (UGC). India, December 2013.
  • Scholarship in Graduate Aptitude Test in Engineering (GATE), 2013 conducted by Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), India.
  • Scholarship in GATE, 2014 conducted by IIT, India.

Contact Information

  • Please contact me by email: mkgupta@andrew.cmu.edu