My two and a half years at Ashoka University have been full of incredible experiences – academic, extracurricular, cultural, as well as personal. I am a third-year undergraduate student majoring in biology. There are many advantages to being a student at Ashoka, and one cannot list all of them down in an article like this. However, there is one aspect that has been crucial to my education over here, and that is the immense support and guidance I have received towards participating in academic research. At an undergraduate level, student participation is rarely observed, especially in our country. This is one of the many ways Ashoka tends to deviate from the norm and I can only be glad for it.

The idea that one could help a professor in their research as an undergraduate student was put forth in a biochemistry class at the end of my second year. Shubhasis Haldar, Assistant Professor of Biology, asked all of us to read upon our assigned topics, and I found mine to be fairly interesting. By the end of the semester, Prof. Haldar asked me to join him and his two PhD students in writing a publication on something called the Talin-Integrin Hub. I was delighted by the scope of the paper. Prof. Haldar envisioned us as proposing something which was entirely new yet entirely fundamental to the field, and I could find myself agreeing easily.

Now, what exactly is Talin-Integrin Hub? Well, imagine a small machine inside almost every cell of our bodies and not just us, but almost all living creatures. Now this machine is responsible for performing all important tasks like connecting our cells to each other, sensing and communicating with the environment, and even maintaining the movement and migration of cells in our body. Simply put, this machine would be indispensable. That is exactly what we explore in our publication. This imaginary machine is actually a hub of proteins in our cells.

Now, what exactly is Talin-Integrin Hub? Well, imagine a small machine inside almost every cell of our bodies and not just us, but almost all living creatures. Now this machine is responsible for performing all important tasks like connecting our cells to each other, sensing and communicating with the environment, and even maintaining the movement and migration of cells in our body. Simply put, this machine would be indispensable. That is exactly what we explore in our publication. This imaginary machine is actually a hub of proteins in our cells. Two of these are extremely important – Talin and Integrin, and these are the protagonists of the story we narrate. Just like any other story, here too, the protagonists have to work together, each failing without the other; a perennial pairing.

Two of these are extremely important – Talin and Integrin, and these are the protagonists of the story we narrate. Just like any other story, here too, the protagonists have to work together, each failing without the other; a perennial pairing.

Our publication offers some very interesting propositions to this growing field of study. We proposed a unified model of the working of this system and highlighted the impact of mechanical force – the simple push and pull kind – on this system of proteins. Revising old research methods and addressing new ones is crucial, and consequently a small section of our publication is devoted to this. Finally, we also address many applications coming out of this field – biological and medicinal. Just like malfunctions in any machine will make it go wrong, malfunctions in this system of proteins may lead to a number of dangerous diseases and disorders. A prominent example of such a malfunction would be the formation of a cancer inside the body, where these proteins are heavily implicated.

The spread of any new idea is the greatest when it reaches the right audience. The American Chemical Society was ready to provide us with a medium to put forth our ideas through one of their journals, Biochemistry. There isn’t much to be said about this journal, except that it is very old and prestigious. One couldn’t ask for a better place to publish their findings or their ideas. They have a large readership, but most importantly, they like to focus on topics which are of great relevance to modern science.

Prof. Haldar and my co-authors Soham Chakraborty and Souradeep Banerjee have shown incredible trust in my abilities, and I cannot thank them enough. For the foreseeable future, I plan to carry out even more research in biology. I do not yet know what area of study that will lie in, however thanks to this publication, I now have a much clearer picture on the inner workings of scientific academia. From working with PhD students to learning how to write a scientific publication and engaging with the response, I feel I have come a long way from where I started as a student.

Manasven Raina, Undergraduate 2020, talks about being an undergraduate researcher at Ashoka