Sumit Majumder (Postdoctoral Fellow)

sumitkm [at] mit.edu

Publications

DNA and RNA are best known as carriers of genetic information, but their sequence-encoded interactions also drive emergent behaviors that make them rich, programmable polymers. At the intersection of soft matter and cell biology, my work takes a bottom-up approach: I build condensates from nucleic acids and study how they self-organize, how they behave inside living cells, and what makes them materially distinct from conventional polymers. To enable this, I designed patchyDNA and patchyRNA, single-stranded chains carrying engineered base-pairing "stickers." Using these chains, I ask how sequence, valence, and chain architecture shape the emergent properties of nucleic-acid condensates: how sequence programs tunable viscoelasticity and multi-phase coexistence within a single droplet, how cellular context modifies in vitro design rules, and when chain architecture overrides chemistry to set condensate identity. Together, these directions aim toward a predictive framework for nucleic-acid soft matter.