Sumit Mukherjee

Courses:

Molecular Biology (BIOL 4360)- Fall 2025

Research interest:

Parasites have developed remarkable strategies to invade their hosts and thrive within them. Exploring these mechanisms at the molecular level offers the potential to devise treatments for parasitic infections that impact the global population. Such investigations also promise to illuminate broader principles of biochemistry and cell biology. Our focus is on Plasmodium falciparum, a protozoan parasite responsible for malaria.

Many of the adaptations that enable the malaria parasite to survive intracellularly remain enigmatic. Notably, nearly half of the Plasmodium proteome consists of proteins with undefined roles. Our research aims to elucidate the functions of these mysterious proteins, with a particular emphasis on proteases. P. falciparum encodes a variety of proteases from distinct families, which play critical roles in diverse cellular pathways essential for the parasite’s persistence within its human host. We use biochemical, cell biological and genetic methodologies to define the role of malaria proteases and other proteins of unknown functions. By studying the these, we want to determine how perturbation of specific life cycle pathways confers a fitness cost to the malaria parasites and how that can be exploited to develop novel antimalaria treatment strategies.

Selected Publications:

Mukherjee S, Nasamu A, Rubiano K, Goldberg DE. Activation of the Plasmodium egress effector subtilisin-like protease 1 is achieved by plasmepsin X destruction of the propiece. MBIO, 2023. doi:10.1128/mbio.00673-23

Hasan MM, Polino AJ, Mukherjee S, Vaupel B, Goldberg DE. The mature N termini of Plasmodium effector proteins confer specificity of export. MBIO, 2023 doi: 10.1128/mbio.01215-23

Mukherjee S, Nguyen S, Sharma E, Goldberg DE: Maturation and substrate processing topography of the Plasmodium falciparum invasion/egress protease plasmepsin X. Nature Communications, 2022, doi: 10.1038/s41467-022-32271-7.

Polino AJ, Miller JJ, Bhakat S, Mukherjee S, Bobba S, Bowman GR, Goldberg DE: The nepenthesin insert in the Plasmodium falciparum aspartic protease plasmepsin V is necessary for enzyme function. Journal of Biological Chemistry, 2022, doi: 10.1016/j.jbc.2022.102355

Complete list of publications:

https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=uX-Yno0AAAAJ&hl=en&oi=ao