Tamanash Bhattacharya

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Background

Tamanash grew up in Calcutta, known as "The City of Joy," located in eastern India. His lifelong fascination with zoonotic viruses and poly-microbial interactions began after he graduated with a bachelor's in bioengineering and interned in a clinical virology lab during an ongoing viral outbreak. Tamanash next obtained his Ph.D. from Indiana University, where he was advised by Dr. Richard Hardy and Dr. Irene Newton. His graduate school research revolved around understanding how the greatest pandemic in the natural world, caused by the bacterial endosymbiont Wolbachia pipientis, helps protect insects from RNA virus infections.

Research Interests

Tamanash studies how mosquito-borne viruses (arboviruses) adapt to the remarkably different environments of vertebrate hosts and insect vectors. These viruses must replicate in organisms that diverged over 700 million years ago, such as endothermic mammals, reptiles, and birds, which possess complex innate and adaptive immune defenses, as well as ectothermic mosquitoes that employ distinct antiviral pathways. Understanding how arboviruses navigate this dual-host lifestyle provides fundamental insight into viral evolution and host–pathogen interactions. Using complementary molecular, evolutionary, and cell-based approaches, he investigates how alphaviruses, a specific family of arboviruses, balance fitness across hosts and hopes to uncover evolutionary mechanisms that enable viral niche expansion. 

His recent focus has been the alphavirus “opal” stop codon, a single codon that profoundly shapes viral replication strategies. Tamanash and colleagues discovered that this codon not only optimizes viral fitness across host temperatures but also preserves replication organelle integrity, thereby blunting antiviral immune sensing. These findings reframe the opal codon as a key determinant of alphavirus adaptation, illustrating how subtle genetic features can tune viral survival across diverse host environments. Ultimately, his work aims to illuminate the evolutionary strategies that allow arboviruses to thrive in multiple hosts and inform new approaches for controlling viral disease.

Other Interests

When he is not in lab, Tamanash enjoys spending time with his family and dog, Suzie. He also likes to travel, and read books on cosmic and gothic horror.

Tamanash Bhattacharya's curriculum vitae

Publications

  1. Bhattacharya T*, Freeman TS, Alleman EM, Wang F, Chechik L, Emerman M, Myles KM, Malik HS. The Sindbis virus nsP3 opal codon protects viral RNA and fitness by maintaining replication spherule integrity. bioRxiv [Preprint]. 2025. doi: 10.1101/2025.09.27.679005. *Corresponding author
  2. Willcox AC, Gobillot TA, Kikawa C, Baumgarten NE, Stoddard CI, Sung K, Bhattacharya T, Freeman TS, Marceau J, Humes D, Overbaugh J. Identification of AMOTL2 as an antiviral factor that enhances the human type I interferon response against Zika virus. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 2025 Sep 9;122(36):e2507955122.
  3. Kenaston, M. W., Cherkashchenko, L., Skawinski, C. L. S., Fishburn, A. T., Peddamallu, V., Florio, C. J., Robertson, A. E., Bhattacharya, T., Young, J. M., Malik, H. S., & Shah, P. S. (2025). Yellow fever virus interactomes reveal common and divergent strategies of replication and evolution for mosquito-borne flaviviruses [Preprint]. bioRxiv. https://doi.org/10.1101/2025.06.14.659623
  4. Bhattacharya T*, Alleman EM, Freeman TS, Noyola AC, Emerman M, Malik HS. (2025). A conserved opal termination codon optimizes a temperature-dependent trade-off between protein production and processing in alphaviruses. Science Advances 11(16): eads7933. *Corresponding author
  5. Watson KJ, Bromley RE, Sparklin BC, Gasser MT, Bhattacharya T, Lebov JF, Tyson T, Dai N, Teigen LE, Graf KT, Foster JM, Michalski M, Bruno VM, Lindsey AR, Corrêa IR Jr, Hardy RW, Newton IL, Dunning Hotopp JC. (2023) Common analysis of direct RNA sequencinG CUrrently leads to misidentification of m5C at GCU motifs. Life Science Alliance 7(2): e202302201.
  6. Bhattacharya T, Yan L, Zaher H, Newton IL, Hardy RW. Differential viral RNA methylation contributes to pathogen blocking in Wolbachia-colonized arthropod. bioRxiv. 2021 Jan 1.
  7. Lindsey ARI, Bhattacharya T, Hardy RW, Newton ILG. Wolbachia and Virus Alter the Host Transcriptome at the Interface of Nucleotide Metabolism Pathways. mBio. 2021 Feb 9;12(1):e03472-20. DOI: 10.1128/mBio.03472-20. PMID: 33563832; PMCID: PMC7885120.
  8. Bhattacharya T, Rice DW, Hardy RW, Newton I. 2020. Adaptive evolution in DNMT2 supports its role in the dipteran immune response. bioRxiv:2020.2009.2015.297986.
  9. Bhattacharya T, Newton ILG, Hardy RW. Viral RNA is a target for Wolbachia-mediated pathogen blocking. PLoS Pathog. 2020 Jun 18;16(6):e1008513. DOI: 10.1371/journal.ppat.1008513. PMID: 32555677; PMCID: PMC7326284.
  10. Lindsey ARI*, Bhattacharya T*, Newton ILG, Hardy RW. Conflict in the Intracellular Lives of Endosymbionts and Viruses: A Mechanistic Look at Wolbachia-Mediated Pathogen-blocking. Viruses. 2018 Mar 21;10(4):141. DOI: 10.3390/v10040141. PMID: 29561780; PMCID: PMC5923435. *Equal Contributions
  11. Bhattacharya T, Newton ILG. Mi Casa es Su Casa: how an intracellular symbiont manipulates host biology. Environ Microbiol. 2017 Oct 27:10.1111/1462-2920.13964. DOI: 10.1111/1462-2920.13964. Epub ahead of print. PMID: 29076641; PMCID: PMC5924462.
  12. Bhattacharya T, Newton ILG, Hardy RW. Wolbachia elevates host methyltransferase expression to block an RNA virus early during infection. PLoS Pathog. 2017 Jun 15;13(6):e1006427. DOI: 10.1371/journal.ppat.1006427. PMID: 28617844; PMCID: PMC5472326. (Featured in Fox59 news, IDS news).
  13. Dutta SK, Bhattacharya T, Tripathi A. Chikungunya virus: genomic microevolution in Eastern India and its in-silico epitope prediction. 3 Biotech. 2018 Jul;8(7):318. DOI: 10.1007/s13205-018-1339-3. Epub 2018 Jul 14. PMID: 30023150; PMCID: PMC6045979.