Telomeres and immunityHow telomere length talks to the tumour microenvironment
Non-telomeric TRF2 binding controls IL1R1 and TERT in a telomere-length-sensitive way, linking telomere state to NF-κB signalling and immune infiltration.
Cancer cell & molecular biologist
Subhajit Dutta
Telomeres, mitochondria and ageing in cancer, read through imaging and computation.
Welcome. I study how telomere biology and mitochondrial function, two systems that change with age, shape what cancer cells become, how they move and how they talk to the immune system. I pair hands-on molecular cell biology and super-resolution microscopy with variational optical flow, deep learning and large-scale public genomic data.
One line of my work concerns mitochondria at the leading edge of migrating cancer cells, where I identified a mitochondria-associated translational hotspot: a site of local protein synthesis at the cell front. Earlier, we showed that telomere length regulates genes far from chromosome ends through non-telomeric binding of the shelterin protein TRF2: telomere-length-dependent TRF2 occupancy at the IL1R1 promoter tunes NF-κB-driven immune signalling in breast tumours, and TRF2 at the TERT promoter controls telomerase expression itself (eLife, 2024 and 2025). I have since extended this to telomere-maintenance and senescence programmes in human immune ageing.
Alongside experiments I build quantitative and computational tools across scales: biophysical analysis of the actin cytoskeleton by variational optical flow and nematic order; pan-cancer integration of TCGA, DepMap and CPTAC with single-cell and spatial transcriptomics and proteomics; gene regulation from expression to chromatin structure, looping and transcription-factor occupancy; and image analysis from histopathology to high-content 4D light-sheet and 5D live-cell FLIM data. The thread through all of it is one question: how telomere biology, mitochondrial function and developmental (oncofetal) programmes together decide what a cancer cell becomes (tumorigenesis) and where it goes (metastasis). If that overlaps with your work, I would be glad to hear from you.
Branched actin network at the leading edgeMitochondriaLocal translation
Now
Researcher, Institute of Biochemistry and Molecular Cell Biology, UKE Hamburg
Selected work
Three papers that show the range: a co-first-author mechanism paper, a follow-up on telomerase regulation, and a sole-author quantitative study of cell migration.
Four questions, one cell
My work runs on two tracks that keep meeting: experiments on telomere and mitochondrial biology in cancer cells, and computational analyses of public genomic, imaging and clinical data at pan-cancer scale.
Mitochondria in migrationThe Mitochondria–Actin–Translation Hub
Mitochondria positioned at the front of migrating cancer cells mark a mitochondria-associated translational hotspot, a site of local protein synthesis at the leading edge.
Quantitative imagingFrom actin images to nematic fields
TV-L1 optical flow, orientational order and topological defect analysis applied to live-cell and super-resolution data, with deep-learning pipelines for microscopy.
Pan-cancer computationRegulatory, spatial and immune structure in public data
Sole-author analyses integrating TCGA, DepMap, CPTAC, ENCODE and spatial transcriptomics to find structure that single studies miss.
How my work is different
Most projects sit either at the bench or at the computer. I work across both: the same question moves from experiment to image to model, back to the bench for perturbation, and on to validation in patient material. In parallel, I use large public datasets in two ways, to test a specific hypothesis at scale and to let the data suggest new ones.
One question, the whole loop
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Wet lab
Molecular and cell biology: CRISPR editing, ChIP, reporter assays, tumour organoids and xenografts.
TRF2 binding at the IL1R1 promoter, eLife 2024
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Imaging
Live-cell, super-resolution and FLIM microscopy of the actin cytoskeleton and organelles.
Mitochondria-associated translational hotspots, thesis 2026
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Dry lab
Quantitative models of what the images and sequencing show: optical flow, nematic order, statistics and machine learning.
Temporal order in 48,134 cell tracks, bioRxiv 2026
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Perturbation
Change one variable and watch the system respond: gene knockdown and overexpression, telomere elongation and shortening, drugs.
Engineered telomere length tunes TERT, eLife 2025
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Validation
Test the result in patient tissue, independent cohorts and an orthogonal assay before calling it a finding.
Over 90 triple-negative breast tumours, eLife 2024
Each answer becomes the next question at the bench.
Public data at scale, used two ways
Hypothesis-drivenStart with a mechanism, test it across thousands of tumours
- A patient-specific component of tumour telomere length, replicated in TCGA and PCAWG (bioRxiv 2026)
- AP-1 motif architecture in olaparib-adaptive chromatin, with covariate-adjusted reanalysis (Front. Syst. Biol. 2026)
Data-drivenStart with the data, let structure suggest the question
- Chromosomal-instability-like fields that mark immune-cold neighbourhoods in spatial transcriptomics (bioRxiv 2026)
- A regulatory atlas of 6,983 cancer GWAS variants (medRxiv 2026)
Patterns found in public data become hypotheses to perturb at the bench; bench findings are checked against public cohorts.
Academic journey
Where I have trained and worked, from my first degree to now, most recent first.
- 2023 – presentResearcherUniversity Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf (UKE), University of Hamburg
Research on cytoskeletal dynamics, organelle coordination and local translation in cancer cell migration. Teaching in UKE degree programmes (2026); supervised master's and PhD students in live-cell imaging, image analysis and cloning.
- 2020 – 2023Senior research fellowCSIR Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology, New Delhi
Telomere–immune crosstalk in the tumour microenvironment, TRF2-mediated IL1R1 regulation, TERT gene regulation, T cell ageing, machine learning for telomere length prediction from gene expression.
- 2020Junior research fellowIndian Institute of Technology Jodhpur
Single-molecule opto-genomics for immune checkpoint blockade; single-molecule imaging of T-cell receptor serial engagement.
- 2019Visiting researcherUniversity of Helsinki
Lineage-specific transcription factors in liver cancer, trans-differentiation, next-generation sequencing analysis.
- 2018 – 2019Junior research fellowNational Institute of Science Education and Research, Bhubaneswar
Genetic alterations in gall bladder cancer; graph-based network analysis of tumour angiogenesis.
- 2016 – 2018MSc BiotechnologyBanaras Hindu University, Varanasi
First division, CGPA 8.34/10. DBT Merit Scholarship.
- 2013 – 2016BSc (Hons) BotanyUniversity of Burdwan, West Bengal