Dr. Subhabrata Maiti
Assistant Professor , Chemical Sciences

Since centuries, chemistry as a subject is mainly focused on the challenges of making, purifying and studying compounds. However, for the chemists, still there remains a large void in terms of understanding and mimicking the chemistry of autonomous functioning of cell and eventually life. This led to develop a new branch of chemistry named systems chemistry where the challenges are to create a synthetic organism (de novo form of life) both for better understanding the inner functioning of biology and also to create engineered life forms. In this context it is worthy to mention that one of the fundamental feature of life is that it operates out-of-equilibrium and it needs constant influx of energy to remain in a dynamic state. To this end, the prime aim of our research direction will be to find the fundamentals of emerging behavior in dynamic self-assembly processes. At the same time the design of energy dependent, life-inspired catalytic chemical systems that can potentially contribute towards sustainable chemical engineering and healthcare technology will be investigated. Overall, the research area will be multidisciplinary, encompassing the area of (bio)organic chemistry, colloidal chemistry, nanotechnology and flow chemistry. Thus our prime research activities will be the following-

i) Dynamic self-assembly, nano/microscale motion and evolution: It is hypothesized that life first started on the planet Earth as a unicellular body almost 3.5-4 billion years ago. Then with time it gains complexity and starts assembling to the formation of colonial organisms like microbes and gradually to more complex multicellular body with reproductive property. Herein, we will investigate the migratory and assembly behavior of different biomolecules containing nano(micro)scale materials and how it should affect the growth and replication of the overall system.

ii) Multivalent colloidal systems for (bio)sensing and (bio)catalysis: The aim of this research direction will be to judiciously develop nano-structures which can detect disease-specific proteins/enzymes in straightforward and non-invasive way. On the other hand, this project will demonstrate the utility of dynamic combinatorial chemistry (DCC) for the development of systems with the size and complexity of proteins which are also disease specific. This will constitute a major step forward for this technology, which has so far been limited to molecular systems of relatively low complexity and structural variety. Additionally, these nanostructures will be used for task-specific enzymatic catalysis as well as to delineate the role of catalytic property of nucleic acid structures with an aim of designing ‘synthetic ribosome’.

• Rishi Ram Mahato, Ekta Shandilya, Basundhara Dasgupta, Subhabrata Maiti*. "Dictating Catalytic Preference and Activity of a Nanoparticle by Modulating Its Multivalent Engagement" ACS Catalysis, 2021, 11, 8504-8509.
• Akshi Deshwal, Subhabrata Maiti*. "Macromolecular Crowding Effect on the Activity of Liposome-Bound Alkaline Phosphatase: A Paradoxical Inhibitory Action" Langmuir, 2021, 37, 7273-7284.
  Ekta Shandilya, Basundhara Dasgupta, Subhabrata Maiti*. "Interconnectivity between Surface Reactivity and Self‐assembly of Kemp Elimination Catalyzing Nanorods" Chemistry - A European Journal, 2021, 27, 7831-7836.
• Sheetal Rani, Basundhara Dasgupta, Gaurav K Bhati, Kalpana Tomar, Sabyasachi Rakshit, Subhabrata Maiti*. "Superior Proton Transfer Catalytic Promiscuity of Cytochrome C in Self‐organized Media" ChemBioChem, 2021, 22, 1285-1291. (selected as cover feature)
• Sushmitha Chandrabhas,+ Subhabrata Maiti,+ Ilaria Fortunati, Camilla Ferrante, Luca Gabrielli, Leonard J. Prins. "Nucleotide‐selective templated self‐assembly of nanoreactors under dissipative conditions" Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. 2020, 59, 22223-22229. ([+] = equal contribution)
• Akshi Deshwal, Himanshu Chitra, Madhusudan Maity, Santanu K Pal, Subhabrata Maiti*. "Sucrose-mediated heat-stiffening microemulsion-based gel for enzyme entrapment and catalysis" Chem. Commun. 2020, 56, 10698-10701.
• Ekta Shandilya, Subhabrata Maiti. “Deconvolution of Transient Species in a Multivalent fuel‐driven Multistep Assembly under Dissipative Condition” ChemSystemsChem 2020, 2, e1900040.
• Subhabrata Maiti, Ilaria Fortunati, Camilla Ferrante, Paolo Scrimin and Leonard J. Prins. “Dissipative self-assembly of vesicular nanoreactors” Nature Chem. 2016, 8, 725.