Research is focused on four main areas: misfolded proteins and disease, intracellular membrane traffic, autoimmune disease and haematopoietic stem cell biology.
Kumar has given proteins hyperstable folding properties by inserting fluorinated amino acids into them.
protein | Protein subunit | Protein-protein interaction | Hfq protein | protein domain | Protein-protein_interaction | Protein Data Bank | RNA-binding protein | Promyelocytic leukemia protein | G protein | Wiskott–Aldrich syndrome protein | Protein G | protein dimer | Protein A | folding | C-reactive protein | Bone morphogenetic protein 2 | AMP-activated protein kinase | wet-folding | Transmembrane protein | Tau protein | Sterol regulatory element-binding protein | SR protein | Rab escort protein | Protein structure | protein structure | Protein phosphatase 2 | protein kinase | Protein Information Resource | Protein folding |
Researchers such as Francisco Blanco et al. have used protein NMR to show that beta-hairpins can be formed from isolated short peptides in aqueous solution, suggesting that hairpins could form nucleation sites for protein folding.
Google Compute was a separately downloadable add-on for the Google Toolbar which utilized the user's computer to help the Folding@home distributed computing project, which studies disease-relevant protein folding and other molecular dynamics.
Methylthioninium chloride (INN, or methylene blue, proposed trade name Rember) is an investigational drug being developed by the University of Aberdeen and TauRx Therapeutics that has been shown in early clinical trials to be an inhibitor of Tau protein aggregation.
In 2009 he was awarded the Royal Medal by the Royal Society "for his outstanding contributions to the understanding of the mechanisms of protein folding and mis-folding, and the implications for disease."
2007 Wiley Prize in Biomedical Science jointly with Arthur L. Horwich of Yale School of Medicine, "for their significant contribution in protein folding".
Even though the HP model abstracts away many of the details of protein folding, it is still an NP-hard problem on both 2D and 3D lattices.
In 2000 he moved to the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at the University of California, San Diego as the Francis Crick Chair in the Physical Sciences at UCSD and in addition to continuing his work on many body chemical physics, protein folding and structure prediction, he is also studying stochastic aspects of cell biology.