Murali Palangat

mpalangat at wisc.edu

Ph.D. 1992
University of Dehli


I graduated from Madras Christian College in 1985 with a Masters Degree specializing in Plant Biochemistry and then moved to the nations' capital, Delhi, for my graduate studies. I graduated with a PhD from the University of Delhi in 1992. As part of my doctoral thesis I studied how the photosynthetic enzyme RuBP carboxylase is regulated by phosphorylation of its small subunits. In collaboration with my lab fellows I also investigated how RNA polymerase II is regulated by the kinase activity of gibberellin receptor in pea epicotyls. I then moved to the University of Alabama at Birmingham in late 1992 to join the laboratory of Deodutta Roy as a postdoctoral fellow, where I studied how tyrosine phosphorylation of nuclear proteins is modulated during steroid hormone induced renal carcinogenesis and identified some of the target nuclear matrix associated phosphoproteins. In July of 1995, I joined Bob while he was still at Washington University, St. Louis, to pursue my interest in RNA polymerase II. I have been in Bob's lab since, initially as a postdoctoral fellow and now as an Assistant Scientist.
      The elongation properties of RNA polymerase II (RNAPII) are altered by intrinsic signals such as pause, arrest and termination signals or extrinsic stimuli such as elongation factors. My long-term goals are to understand how these intrinsic and extrinsic signals alter the elongation properties of human RNA polymerase II and make it transcribe genes either inefficiently or efficiently. We are using the well-characterized transcriptional pause site recognized by human RNAPII in the HIV-1 LTR (see Palangat et. al., 1998; Palangat and Landick, 2001 & Palangat et.al., 2004) to dissect how RNAPII recognizes and responds to intrinsic and extrinsic signals and get a better understanding of the structure-function relationship of the protein-nucleic acids interaction in a transcription elongation complex (so stay tuned).
      I live in Middleton, a suburb of Madison, with my wife and two daughters. Apart from working in the lab, I enjoy photography and spending time in the wilderness with my family.