The Pakrasi Lab

The Pakrasi Lab studies how cyanobacteria use solar energy to drive the chemistry of life.

We work in many disciplines and have projects that focus on determining how the molecular machines that capture solar energy are assembled and maintained, how cyanobacteria respond to environmental changes at the systems level, and how to engineer new strains of cyanobacteria that are capable of channeling solar energy into biochemical production.

We are part of the Department of Biology at Washington University in St. Louis.

Quick Updates

8/1/2024 The Pakrasi lab welcomes EECE graduate student Ally Wilcox to the lab

1/2/2024 The Pakrasi lab welcomes Staff Scientist Dr. Chris Jones

1/2/2024 Visiting graduate student Gaurav Bingi joins the Pakrasi Lab from IIT-Bombay

11/3/2023 All teams come together for the first virtual DOE-EES project kickoff meeting

11/2023 Matt Lima, a graduate student in the WU School of Engineering, joins the Pakrasi Lab

10/27/2023 The Pakrasi Lab is attending the 49th Midwest/Southeast Photosynthesis Conference

09/05/2023 Graduate student Keerthi Mani from Greg Engel’s lab at the University of Chicago visits the Pakrasi Lab

12/2/2022 Congratulations to Dr. Patricia Walker on the successful defense of her thesis!

10/30/2022 Congratulations to Sandeep Biswas for winning a post-doctorate poster award at the 48th Midwest/Southeast Photosynthesis Conference

06/19/2022 Congratulations to Anindita Banerjee for winning a post-doctorate poster award at the 14th Workshop in Cyanobacteria

06/16-19/2022 The Pakrasi lab is attending the 14th annual Workshop in Cyanobacteria hosted by Michigan State University this year.

04/20/2022 Congratulations to Dr. Virginia Johnson for a successful thesis defense!

10/23/2021 Congratulations to Annesha Sengupta for winning the “Best Post-Doc Talk” award at this year’s MW Photosynthesis meeting.

10/12/2021 Pakrasi Lab members, Ginger Johnson, Patricia Walker, and Jorge Guio presented at the 2021 PMB retreat.

9/08/2021 The Pakrasi Lab welcomes a visiting graduate student from Spain. Jorge will be working closely with Dr. Bandyyopadhyay and Dr. Liu.

4/20/2021 The Pakrasi Lab welcomes visiting scholar, Dr. Max Schubert. Max will be working in the lab to create a transposon library for UTEX 2973 as a part of the minimal genome project.

3/10/2021 The Pakrasi Lab welcomes our newest rotation student, William McHargue. Will will be working alongside postdoctoral researcher, Deng, and other members of the lab on his rotation project for the next few weeks.