Komal Soni PhD

Komal had her first experience of Structural Biology during her Bachelors degree where she was involved in a project that involved structure modelling and computational screening for potential drug candidates. However, it was only during a summer research internship with Prof. John Markley at the NMR facility, University of Wisconsin, USA during her Masters that she really got fascinated with NMR, and after that there was no looking back.

She next travelled to Germany where she undertook her PhD studies with Prof. Michael Sattler at the Bavarian NMR Center within the Technical University of Munich. Here she worked on several alternative splicing factors affecting pre-mRNA splicing using NMR as well as X-ray crystallography and SAXS. In addition, she got the opportunity to work on NMR based ligand screening disrupting a novel protein-protein interaction interface on tubulin which also led to a patent for the compound. She then moved on for her postdoc to the group of Prof. Irmgard Sinning at the Heidelberg University where she built upon her expertise in structural biology of protein-RNA complexes using NMR and crystallography. Alongside, it was here that she got her first exposure to cryo-EM. What started with a simple exploratory learning project proceeded to being one of the most rewarding projects she had worked on. She solved the structure of a novel state of the spliceosome committed to premature disassembly. She also solved structures of small protein complexes (less than 100 kDa) and visualised protein free RNA molecules using cryo-EM. She then briefly moved to Prof. Janosch Hennig's group at the University of Bayreuth where she worked on a challenging polyA binding protein before moving to the UK and joining Sygnature Discovery.

Outside of work, Komal loves to play badminton and spend time with her family. When time permits, she enjoys binge watching crime and mystery shows on Netflix.