Dr Amrita Mukherjee

Amrita completed her PhD in Andrew Renault’s lab at the Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology in Tübingen, Germany before moving to King’s College London to start working on developmental neurobiology in Darren Williams’ lab. Here she discovered a role for mitochondria in developmental “pruning” - an intriguing phenomenon where neuronal compartments are selectively destroyed without cell death. She then moved to Cambridge in 2018 to join Paul Conduit’s lab in the Department of Zoology. Here she continued to explore the role of cellular cytoskeleton in developing and mature sensory neurons. She uncovered a role for somatic Golgi as sites for microtubule generation and polarity maintenance in mature sensory neurons and also found differential requirement of cytoskeletal regulatory proteins in neurons with different branching patterns. With an aim to shift her research focus on heath and disease, in December 2020 she joined Miguel Martins’ lab at the MRC Toxicology Unit. Here she is exploring the role of mitochondrial dysfunction and toxins in different cells and tissues in the context of a whole organism. When not in lab she enjoys reading, learning to play the violin and drawing.

Her current research interests are understanding the effects of toxins and mitochondrial dysfunction within cells and tissues in whole organism. Using Drosophila as a model system she is studying the interorganelle effects of mitochondrial toxicity and dysfunction within different cell types of the digestive and excretory system. She is also interested in understanding the systemic effect of gut toxicity on other organ systems like the fat bodies and brain and how different organ systems communicate with each other.