Rohit Roy received his MS-Dual Degree in Computational Natural Sciences (CNS). His research was supervised by Prof. Abhijit Mitra.
Here’s a summary of Rohit’s thesis, Magnesium Motifs in RNA (MagMotiRNA) as explained by him:
Negatively charged RNA molecules require positive metal cations to neutralize the accumulated negative charge, a role most often played by magnesium cations. Various RNA molecules are known to be dependent on magnesium ions for performing their function. To help comprehensively address the unanswered questions regarding why magnesium binds specific regions in RNA and how it affects RNA structure, a querying tool were developed to help detect recurrent and conserved magnesium-RNA patterns based on a graph representation of magnesium binding sites. The toolkit also includes methods to deal with unreliable experimental data and perform thorough analysis of specific motifs across a dataset. A database of magnesium-binding profiles was also developed for 19 distinct RNA molecules, by collating information from ~3.5 lakh metal-RNA sites. The toolkit was found to be useful in describing magnesium-RNA interactions based on the putative functional role performed by the metal ion, as demonstrated using a case-study of RNA backbone kinks and five magnesium-RNA motifs in literature.