[citation needed] He entered the Indian Institute of Science, Department of Microbiology and Cell Biology Bengaluru in 1976 for doctoral studies on Mycobacteriophage in the laboratory of Prof. K.P Gopinathan.
[4] Karnik started his independent laboratory at the Cleveland Clinic research foundation as assistant staff studying Angiotensin receptor molecular biology and was promoted to full-staff in 2002.
[11] These discoveries facilitated the development of novel transgenic models of cardiovascular diseases, β-arrestin biased agonists,[12] next generation antihypertensive drugs and novel structures of GPCRs.
In 1986, Karnik and colleagues at MIT reported that production of a functional, light sensing-state of rhodopsin depended on formation of a unique disulfide bond that is conserved in >90% GPCRs.
[13][14] The Karnik Laboratory at Cleveland Clinic extended this finding to other hormone and neurotransmitter GPCRs including β-adrenegic and angiotensin receptors.