Satyajit (Jitu) Mayor
National Centre for Biological Sciences
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Primary Section: 22, Cellular and Developmental Biology Secondary Section: 27, Evolutionary Biology Membership Type:
International Member
(elected 2015)
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Biosketch
Satyajit "Jitu" Mayor is recognized for his studies on membrane organization and endocytosis. He graduated with a Masters in Chemistry from the Indian Institute of Technology, Mumbai, in 1985 and obtained his PhD in Life Sciences from The Rockefeller University, New York in 1991. After a post-doctoral fellowship at Columbia University, New York, he returned to India in 1995 to join the newly founded National Centre for Biological Sciences (NCBS), a centre of the Tata Institute for Fundamental Research (TIFR). Currently he is Senior Professor and Director at National Centre for Biological Sciences, and also the Institute for Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine at Bangalore, India. He is a Fellow of the Indian Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Sciences (India), Royal Society of Chemistry, a Foreign Fellow of EMBO, and a Foreign Associate of National Academy of Sciences of the United States.
Research Interests
Employing a multi-disciplinary approach, Jitu Mayor’s laboratory has developed new concepts (nanoscale complexes as units of meso-scale membrane organization), new tools (fluorescence anisotropy microscopy) and new methodologies (quantitative physical tools) to understand and study organization and dynamics of membranes in living cells. This has led an understanding of how a cell regulates local organization of its cell membrane constituents, from the nanometer scale in specialized domains in cell membranes (termed rafts) to the micron scale in endocytic pathways. His work has inspired a new picture of the cell membrane as an active composite of a fluid lipid bilayer intertwined with a dynamic cortical cytoskeleton immediately beneath. This has led to the use of the language of active mechanics in addition to existing equilibrium notions to understand how regulated lipid and protein assemblies arise in cell membranes. His work has also provided an understanding of mechanisms and roles for poorly appreciated mechanisms of endocytosis that do not deploy the classical clathrin and dynamin molecular players. Together, Jitu Mayor’s work is important for understanding how signaling reactions in cell membranes are influenced by local membrane composition and how the global composition of the cell membrane may be regulated.
