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This is the official webpage of L. Aravind. Any other webpage, blog (other than one linked below), social networking page claiming to belong to or represent L. Aravind/Aravind L. Iyer or his views or opinions is either some other person or the work of imposters. L. Aravind is also not associated with any other email address than the one provided here.

L. Aravind, PhD

Computational Biology Branch
NCBI, NLM, NIH

Research Interests

  • Evolutionary classification of proteins.
  • Understanding large-scale evolutionary trends in genome evolution.
  • Reconstruction of functional networks of regulatory proteins and metabolic enzyme pathways from genome sequence.
  • Prediction of novel biochemical activities and biological functions of proteins, and inference of organismal biology from comparative sequence and genome analysis.
  • Understanding the fundamental interactions between natural selection and structural/genomic constraints in shaping protein domain diversity.

Announcements

Publications

Brief Biography

I obtained a Masters Degree in Biotechnology from the University of Pune and subsequently moved to Texas A & M University, USA, for my doctoral studies in computational and evolutionary biology. I conducted most of my doctoral research at the National Center for Biotechnology Information/NIH, Maryland and graduated with a Doctorate in Biology from TAMU in December 1999. Currently, I work at the National Center for Biotechnology as a Principal Investigator, and with my group study a variety of problems related to protein-superfamily- and genome- evolution. My research group comprises of two post-doctoral fellows, two Staff Scientists and one graduate student. My most important scientific achievements include:

  1. Establishment of the deep events in the evolution of topoisomerases and primases, the DNA repair system and diverse DNA binding proteins.
  2. Discovery of new domains involved in small molecule binding and elucidation of the evolutionary principles that determine their architectures.
  3. The first quantitative estimates of the role of horizontal gene transfer in evolution.
  4. Identification of the principal evolutionary events that determined the origin of multicellularity in eukaryotes.
  5. Reconstruction of the earliest events that occurred close to the origin of the protein universe.
  6. Establishment of the role of lineage specific gene expansions in the emergence of biological diversity.
  7. Determination of the principal evolutionary events involved in the emergence of specialized Apicomplexan parasites from a generalized parasitic common ancestor.
  8. Elucidating origins of the eukaryotic nonsense mediated RNA degradation system.
  9. Elucidating origins of the ubiquitin conjugation system.

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Last updated: 2017-12-20T18:57:39Z