Dr Iqbal Dulloo

Assistant Professor

Email:

Iqbal.Dulloo@warwick.ac.uk

Office: MB 12

Bluesky: @iqbaldulloo.bsky.social

LinkedIn

Research Clusters

Cells & Development

Microbiology & Infectious Disease

Opportunities in the group

For PhD and postdoctoral opportunities, and interest in potential collaborations, please contact me at the above email address.

Research/Teaching Interests

Cells constantly send and receive messages to keep our bodies functioning properly. This communication ensures that tissues grow, repair, and respond to their environment. When it fails, diseases such as cancer or Alzheimer’s can develop. Our research investigates how cells exchange these molecular messages and how disruptions in this process lead to illness.

We focus on an underexplored signalling pathway in which specific proteins embedded in cell membranes are cut to release fragments that travel to the cell’s nucleus. There, they can switch genes on or off, influencing cell behaviour. This mechanism occurs in many organisms, but we are only beginning to understand its prevalence and importance in humans.

Research: Technical Summary

Our research explores how membrane proteases shape cellular behaviour by generating membrane-bound transcription regulators - signalling molecules that originate within cell membranes and move to the nucleus to control gene expression. These proteins provide an unexpected link between membrane dynamics and transcriptional regulation, with broad implications for human health and disease.

A major focus of our work is the signal peptidase complex (SPC), an essential protease located in the endoplasmic reticulum. Traditionally known for removing signal peptides from newly synthesised proteins, our recent findings reveal that SPC also performs a previously unrecognised function: cleaving membrane proteins to release active signalling fragments.

Our research integrates biochemistry, molecular and cell biology, and quantitative proteomics to uncover how SPC and related proteases regulate protein processing, transcriptional control, and cellular stress responses. We also investigate how viruses such as Zika hijack SPC for their replication, providing insights into host–pathogen interactions.

We use several approaches including CRISPR-based genome editing, proteomic screening, molecular dynamics, confocal imaging, and transcriptomic profiling.

Our work bridges fundamental membrane biology with translational relevance, revealing new mechanisms that connect protease function, gene regulation, and disease pathology.