Profile
Our lab works on theranostic application of metal nanoparticles, optical bio-spectroscopy (both Fluorescence and Raman) techniques and in-situ probing of gold nanoparticle dynamics in cells to understand receptor-targeted nanoparticle interactions. Currently the efforts in our lab have been focused on four main topics, as listed below. 1. Metal nanoconstruct designing for drug delivery, receptor targeted interaction and Bio-imaging. 2. Development of surface enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS) based platform for early diseases biomarkers, pesticides, carcinogens etc. 3. Fluorescence correlation spectroscopy-based detection of disease-related exosomes, as biomarkers. 4. Instrumentation: Currently working on building a portable Raman spectrometer. In future we have plans of building a single instrument capable of measuring fluorescence lifetime (by time correlated single photon counting), fluorescence correlation spectroscopy, fluorescence cross-correlation spectroscopy, and fluorescence anisotropy.
Current Focus Areas
1. Metal nanoconstruct designing for drug delivery, receptor targeted interaction and Bio-imaging. Our research sheds light on the intricate relationship between nanoparticle structure and their targeted drug delivery efficacy, offering insights into designing more efficient nanomedicines.
2. Surface enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS) based platform for probing amyloids. By employing lipid coated silver nanoparticles, we have selectively captured oligomers of amyloid β and probed their structure by SERS. Currently working on developing a sensitive SERS-platform capable of probing amyloid β oligomers for diagnostic applications.
3. SERS based diagnostic-platform for probing exosomes. We have been successful in functionalizing monodisperse silver nanoparticles (AgNPs) with HER-2 targeting DNA-aptamers. These functionalized AgNPs produces “turn-on” SERS signals selectively in the presence of exosomes obtained from HER-2 overexpressing cancer cells.
4. Fluorescence correlation spectroscopy (FCS) based probing of disease-related exosomes. By utilizing FCS, we have probed the binding of amyloids with Small unilamellar vesicles. We are in the process of expanding this expertise to probe disease-related exosomes (e.g. HER-2 containing exosomes) by employing fluorescently labelled targeting molecules.
Selected Publications
Morck, M.M. Bhowmik, D. Pathak, D. Dawood, A. Spudich, J. Ruppel, K. M. (2022). Hypertrophic cardiomyopathy mutations in the pliant and light chain-binding regions of the lever arm of human β-cardiac myosin have divergent effects on myosin function. elife, 11, e76805.
Bhowmik, D.; Culver, K. S. B.; Liu, T.; Odom, T. W. (2019) Resolving Single-Nanoconstruct Dynamics during Targeting and Nontargeting Live-Cell Membrane Interactions. ACS Nano, 13 (12), 13637-13644.
Hu, J.; Wang, D.; Bhowmik, D.; Liu, T.; Deng, S.; Knudson, M. P.; Ao, X.; Odom, T. W., (2019). Lattice-Resonance Metalenses for Fully Reconfigurable Imaging. ACS Nano, 13 (4), 4613-4620.
Bhowmik, D.; Mote, K. R.; MacLaughlin, C. M.; Biswas, N.; Chandra, B.; Basu, J. K.; Walker, G. C.; Madhu, P. K.; Maiti, S. (2015). Cell-Membrane-Mimicking Lipid-Coated Nanoparticles Confer Raman Enhancement to Membrane Proteins and Reveal Membrane-Attached Amyloidbeta Conformation. ACS Nano, 9 (9), 9070-9077.
Bhowmik, D.; Das, A. K.; Maiti, S. (2015). Rapid, cell-free assay for membrane-active forms of amyloid-beta. Langmuir, 31 (14), 4049-4053.