Background

Tamanash was born in Calcutta, “The City of Joy,” located in Eastern India. He received his bachelor’s degree in bioengineering from West Bengal University of Technology. His fascination with zoonotic viruses and poly-microbial interactions began while working as a post-baccalaureate research technician in a clinical virology laboratory at the School of Tropical Medicine. He next obtained his Ph.D. in Microbiology from Indiana University under the mentorship of Dr. Richard Hardy and Dr. Irene Newton. Soon after he started graduate school, Tamanash learned about the greatest pandemic in the world that he had never heard of – caused by the insect endosymbiont Wolbachia pipientis, which infects a vast majority of extant insect species on our planet. While present inside the cells of arthropods like fruit flies and mosquitoes, Wolbachia induces robust inhibition of certain RNA viruses. Tamanash set out to explore the cellular mechanism underlying this remarkable phenomenon for his thesis project, using mosquito-transmitted alphaviruses as an RNA-virus model. Using a combination of in vivo and ex vivo models, he identified cellular stages of virus inhibition in Wolbachia-colonized insect cells and the viral RNA genome as a prime target of inhibition. Surprisingly, Tamanash found that in addition to restricting viruses in the cell, Wolbachia also compromises the ability of viruses produced from such cells to infect naïve cell populations. He showed that these progeny viruses contain a defective RNA genome, carrying aberrant methylation patterns that reduce their infectivity and subsequent spread into naïve mosquito and vertebrate cells. This discovery provided molecular insight as to how Wolbachia limits virus dissemination and transmission in mosquito vectors. Additionally, Tamanash’s work identified the regulatory role of the host cytosine methyltransferase protein (DNMT2) and the most conclusive demonstration that 5-methyl cytosine modification of viral RNA is a novel regulatory signature of arthropods.

Research Interests

Zoonotic RNA viruses are nature’s ultimate minimalists in that they possess the ability to infect a vast range of host species despite their limited genetic repertoire. Unfortunately, this feature also allows such viruses to rapidly expand their host ranges and cause devastating outbreaks around the globe. Regardless of their origin, the first step towards emergence requires these viruses to establish infection into new host species by overcoming multiple infection barriers. This process assuredly involves adaptation against different selective pressures present in the new host, prominently, its immune system. Tamanash proposes that while obligate host-switching events between arthropods and vertebrates impose severe bottlenecks in arbovirus populations, their genomes consist of features that confer the ability to overcome multiple zoonotic barriers. Using alphaviruses as a model, Tamanash plans to use molecular virology, genomics, and evolution, to identify novel adaptive signatures present in viral genomes that allow them to overcome mammalian immunity.

Click here for Tamanash Bhattacharya's curriculum vitae

Publications

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. 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.
6. 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.
7. 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).
8. 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.

*Equal Contributions