I am a Simons Career Development Fellow at NCBS. Previously I was a PhD student with  Dr. Jaydeb Chakrabarti at S. N. Bose National Centre, Kolkata, India. Starting my career as a student of Physical Chemistry, I shifted gears after my PhD and joined Prof. Madan Rao’s group at NCBS to learn how to use different theoretical and computational tools of soft-condensed matter for the study of biological systems.

I am interested in active processes at the cell cortex and how this influences molecular organization at the plasma membrane. I have been developing an effective coarse-grained theory of active phase segregation of passive molecules in an active fluid which provides a mechanism of molecular segregation in living cells driven by cortical actomyosin flows. Examples of such active segregation include : sorting of different actin binding proteins at cell surface (with Prof. Satyajit Mayor’s group at NCBS), formation of immunological synapse between T-cells and antigen presenting cells (with Dr. Abhisek Chaudhuri, IISER, Mohali) and clustering of multivalent proteins such as glycans at the cell surface. I have also been working on agent-based Brownian dynamics simulation of actin and myosin filaments on a substrate (with Dr. Rastko Sknepnek, University of Dundee). This was motivated in part by a recent experimental study of the phase behavior of reconstituted actomyosin on a supported bilayer (D. Koster et al PNAS, 113, E1645 (2016)).

For more details, see my personal webpage (https://sites.google.com/site/dosamit) and Google scholar profile.

Publications

• A. Das, A. Polley and M. Rao, Phase segregation of passive advective particles in an active medium. Phys. Rev. Lett. 116,  068306 (2016)

• A. Das, M. Ghosh, and J. Chakrabarti, Time dependent correlation between dihedral angles as probe for long range communication in proteins. Chem. Phys. Lett. 645, 200 (2016).

• A. Das and J. Chakrabarti, Solvation in nanoscale solvophobic confinement near liquid-gas phase coexistence. Chem. Phys. Lett. 592, 256 (2014). 

• A. Das, J. Chakrabarti and M. Ghosh, Thermodynamics of interfacial changes in a protein-protein complex. Mol. Biosyst. 10, 437 (2014). 

• A. Das and J. Chakrabarti, Microscopic mechanisms of confinement induced slow solvation. J. Phys. Chem. A 117, 10571 (2013). 

• A. Das, J. Chakrabarti and M. Ghosh, Conformational thermodynamics of metal-ion binding to a protein, Chem. Phys. Lett. 581, 91 (2013).

• A. Das, J. Chakrabarti and M. Ghosh, Conformational contribution to thermodynamics of binding in protein-peptide complexes through microscopic simulation, Biophys. J. 104, 1274 (2013).

• A. Das, R. Biswas and J. Chakrabarti, Dipolar solute rotation in ionic liquids, electrolyte solutions and common polar solvents: Emergence of universality, Chem. Phys. Lett. 558, 36 (2013).

• A. Das and J. Chakrabarti, Dimensional crossover in fluids under nanometer-scale confinement. Phys. Rev. E 85, 050601(R) (2012). 

• A. Das, R. Biswas and J. Chakrabarti, Solute rotation in polar liquids: Microscopic basis for the Stokes-Einstein-Debye model, J. Chem. Phys. 136, 014505 (2012). 

• A. Das, R. Biswas and J. Chakrabarti, Dipolar Solute Rotation in a Supercritical Polar Fluid, J. Phys. Chem. A 115, 973 (2011).