Nilesh has been featured on the Center for Genome Engineering as a Featured Research Associate, in which he highlights how his work and the Reineke Lab contribute to the Center for Genome Engineering. A sample question and answer is shown below. Congrats Nilesh!
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Are there any highlights or major achievements in your research? Can you talk a little bit about these topics?

My research is an extension of our labs prior extensive research that has advanced the current understanding of transport of polymeric nucleic acid delivery vehicles (polyplexes) in mammalian cells. One of my main contributions is the development of three dimensional imaging method of polyplexes inside a cell. This method captures a moment in time in a cell as the polyplexes travel across the intracellular highways of actin and microtubules. This study also quantifies key parameters such as intracellular size, distance between polyplexes, and distance of polyplexes from nucleus. We show evidence which suggests that structure of a polymer affects the intracellular behavior of polyplexes. Another major contribution is identifying transport mechanisms of polyplexes along finger-like projections on the surface of a cell called filopodia. Here we offer results which show that filopodia actively participate to detect and internalize an extracellular polyplex.
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