Medicine’s Bibekananda Sahoo leads research published in Cell

Research out of the Xinghong Dai’s lab in the Department of Physiology and Biophysics and led by postdoctoral scholar Bibekananda Sahoo recently revealed that NINJ1, a small membrane protein, actively drives plasma membrane rupture (PMR) during lytic cell death, challenging the long-standing belief that PMR is a passive result of osmotic pressure.

Published in the prestigious journal Cell, the study uses cryoEM to uncover NINJ1’s structure and molecular mechanism, highlighting its pivotal role in regulating inflammation and its potential as a therapeutic target for inflammatory diseases.

Read the paper.