Mayukh Chatterjee grew up asking questions about origins: how organisms began, how the universe started, what lies underneath the visible surface of things. That habit of looking closely at what already exists, rather than reaching for something entirely new, has shaped everything he does.
He is now a fourth-year PMRF PhD scholar at IIT Madras’s Bhupat and Jyoti Mehta School of Biosciences, working under Professor Athi Narayanan Naganathan in the Protein Biophysics Lab. His focus is a drug resistance problem that most researchers approach by creating new drugs. Mayukh is approaching it differently, by reading a solution that evolution wrote millions of years ago, in the genome of a virus.
What the virus already knew
The research begins with an arms race that has been running for billions of years. Bacteriophages are viruses that attack bacteria. When a phage invades a bacterial cell, the bacteria fight back with proteins that identify and cut foreign DNA before it can spread.
Over millions of years, bacteriophages found an extraordinary workaround. They evolved proteins that act like DNA, occupying the bacterial defence machinery and blocking it so the phage can survive. Mayukh explains it plainly, “Bacteria borrowed this same trick to spread resistance genes between cells, shielding incoming DNA from their own defences.”
In other words, drug resistance travels silently through a population on a pathway that evolution perfected in viruses long before humans invented antibiotics.
Unlike the pathways that researchers have been targeting for decades, bacteria have never had evolutionary pressure to defend against this one. Which is exactly what makes it interesting.
“We don’t have to make new drugs,” Mayukh says. “We can work on making bacteria susceptible to the drugs that are already there.” It is a statement that could only come from someone whose instinct has always been to look at what is already in front of him before assuming something new needs to be invented.
From Barasat, with curiosity
Mayukh grew up in Barasat, on the outskirts of Kolkata, close enough to the city to feel its intellectual gravity, and arrived at Presidency University for his BSc and MSc in Biology to find the subject far broader than he had imagined – cell biology, molecular biology, physiology, computation, all woven together. “I didn’t even know that this many sides of biology existed until I joined there,” he says. Alongside the sciences, he read Bengali poetry and the English Romantics like Keats and Blake, painted, learned music, and eventually decided that science was where the largest unanswerable questions lived. But the habit of reading closely, of finding what lies beneath the visible surface, never left.
When COVID struck during his MSc and the wet labs closed, a different door opened. He taught himself computational biology, molecular dynamics simulation, and bioinformatics, and the pandemic confirmed what he had long suspected, that the intersection of biology and physics was where he wanted to work. By the time he arrived at IIT Madras, he knew exactly which intersection he wanted to inhabit.
A question inside the question
There is a second problem buried inside the drug resistance work, one that pulls at Mayukh from the physics direction and refuses to stay quiet. The mimic proteins he studies are highly negatively charged, as is DNA itself. By the logic of physical chemistry, like charges repel.
These proteins should be unstable, disordered, falling apart. But they are not. They are highly structured and stably folded. How? That question sits at the precise intersection of biology and physics that drew him to this field, and it is the one he returns to when biology alone is not enough.
He works in a lab of eight scholars, and the culture there has shaped how he thinks about failure as much as success has. His seniors taught him things that saved months of frustration. “If your seniors are helpful, you can save a lot of mental stress and maybe six or seven months of your PhD work,” he says.
The failures he could not shortcut taught him something more durable: that an experiment failing ten times in the same way is not a verdict on the person running it. It is information about the problem. “Knowing which situation you are in, and having the honesty to call it, is something the PhD teaches you.”
Research and Romanticism
After his PhD, Mayukh plans a postdoc and eventually a professorship. The curiosity that sent him toward biology, then physics, then toward the place where the two meet inside a protein that should not hold together but does, has not changed.
“I may not be that ambitious,” he says. “But I am at least trying to understand something that will help old things come back into the game again.” His research does not invent a new drug. It reads what evolution has already solved and asks whether that solution can be put to a different use.
The Bengali poetry and the English Romantics are still there, set aside while the lab makes its demands, but not gone. After the PhD he will pick them up again and find, probably that they have been shaping his thinking all along.
The habit of reading things closely, of finding what already exists beneath the visible surface, is not so different in a poem as it is in a protein. He has been practising it his whole life. The lab is just the latest place he is putting it to use.
Mayukh Chatterjee is a fourth-year PMRF PhD scholar at IIT Madras’s Bhupat and Jyoti Mehta School of Biosciences, working on bacteriophage-derived DNA-mimicking proteins as a strategy for reversing antibiotic resistance. He holds an MSc in Biology from Presidency University, Kolkata, and studied single-molecule biophysics in Japan on the LOTUS programme. Beyond the lab, he reads poetry and paints.