I did my summer research internship at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign under the guidance of Prof. Chad Rienstra. My project was on the quest of searching lattice structure and dynamics of celebrated antifungal drug Amphotericin-B (AmB) and its interaction with Cholesterol and Ergosterol. The motivation of this project was to understand the working mechanism of the drug inside a cell. Since AmB is also a nephrotoxin and kills good cells (presumably by binding with Cholesterol) besides killing fungal cells (binding with Ergosterol), a modified structure of AmB for targeted functionality is necessary. I used solid-state NMR data of AmB from various experiments and conducted molecular dynamics simulations with restraint inputs from the NMR NOE data. I’m currently continuing to contribute to the project by doing Density Functional theoretic calculations to understand UV-Vis spectrum of the AmB lattice.
