Lakshmi Rajagopal PhD

Lakshmi Rajagopal PhD
Assistant Professor
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Phone: (206) 884-7336

Dr. Rajagopal, PhD, is an Assistant Professor in the Departments of Pediatrics and Microbiology at the University of Washington. She assumed a faculty position in the Department in 2004, subsequent to a postdoctoral fellowship with Dr. Craig E. Rubens at the University of Washington. Her research centers on the role of signaling events that are important for bacterial disease pathogenesis. Current studies in her laboratory are focused on elucidating the role of a serine/threonine kinase in regulation of adaptive responses and consequently virulence of the human neonatal pathogen, Streptococcus agalactiae. Other research interests in her laboratory include understanding signaling events mediated by eukaryotic-type enzymes in human pathogens such as Listeria and Staphylococcus. She earned her Ph.D. from the Jawaharlal Nehru University in India on her work to elucidate the role of pigment in protection against photoxidative damage in the plant pathogen Xanthomonas oryzae pv. oryzae.

Dr. Rajagopal collaborates with Dr. Weiguo Andy Tao at Purdue University to identify phosphorylated proteins in S. agalactiae and with Dr. Adrian Goldman at the University of Helsinki, Finland to resolve their crystal structures. She also collaborates with Dr. Nancy Freitag, Seattle Biomedical Research Institute to pursue studies on signaling events in Listeria monocytogenes.

Undergraduate
Bangalore University, India, B.Sc., Chemistry, Botany and Zoology, 1991

Graduate and Postgraduate
Madurai Kamaraj University, India, M.Sc., Biotechnology, 1993

Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India, Ph.D., Life Sciences, 1999

University of Washington, Department of Microbiology, Postgraduate Fellowship, 1999-2000

Children's Hospital and Regional Medical Center/University of Washington, Department of Pediatrics, Postgraduate Fellowship, 2000-2004

Rajagopal, L., Clancy, A., and Rubens, C.E. (2003) A eukaryotic type serine/threonine kinase and phosphatase in Streptococcus agalactiae reversibly phosphorylate an inorganic pyrophosphatase and affect growth, cell segregation, and virulence. J Biol Chem 278: 14429-14441.

Rajagopal, L., Vo, A., Silvestroni, A., and Rubens, C.E. (2005) Regulation of purine biosynthesis by a eukaryotic-type kinase in Streptococcus agalactiae. Mol Microbiol 56: 1329-1346.

Rantanen, M.K., Lehtio, L., Rajagopal, L., Rubens, C.E., and Goldman, A. (2006) Crystallization and preliminary crystallographic analysis of two Streptococcus agalactiae proteins: the family II inorganic pyrophosphatase and the serine/threonine phosphatase. Acta Crystallograph Sect F Struct Biol Cryst Commun 62: 891-894.

Rajagopal, L., Vo, A., Silvestroni, A., and Rubens, C.E. (2006) "Regulation of cytotoxin expression by converging eukaryotic-type and two component signalling mechanisms in Streptococcus agalactiae" Mol Microbiol 62: 941-57