Amit Sachdeva

Graduate Student in Chemistry
(November 2006-September 2011)

M.Sc. Chemistry, IIT Delhi, 2001
B.Sc. Chemistry, University of Delhi, 1999
Ph.D. Chemistry, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2011

Current position: Associate Professor in Bio-Organic Chemistry, University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK

Previous position: Postdoctoral Researcher, laboratory of Jason Chin,
MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Cambridge, UK

Email: a.sachdeva@uea.ac.uk

Brief Biography

Amit Sachdeva received his B.Sc. degree in chemistry from the University of Delhi, New Delhi, India in 1999. He completed his M.Sc. degree in chemistry from the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi in 2001. In 2001, he joined the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre, Mumbai, India as a scientific officer. Starting in Fall 2006, he was a graduate student in chemistry at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, working under the supervision of Prof. Scott K. Silverman on the in vitro selection of deoxyribozymes. He earned his Ph.D. degree in August 2011. He then moved to Cambridge, UK to begin a postdoc with Jason Chin at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology. In 2015 he began an independent faculty position as Lecturer in Bio-organic Chemistry at University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK.

Research Interests

The focus of my research in the Silverman lab was to identify novel single-stranded DNA molecules that catalyze reactions involving small-molecule and peptide substrates. Towards this goal, I identified deoxyribozymes that catalyze nucleopeptide linkage formation between serine hydroxyl groups and 5’-triphosphate RNA. I also performed in vitro selection experiments to identify deoxyribozymes that have tyrosine and serine kinase activity, and I pursued deoxyribozymes that covalently modify lysine side chains.