Welcome to Deepa Agashe’s lab at the National Centre for Biological Sciences (NCBS), Bangalore!

Organisms often face new, changing or otherwise challenging environments, which can drive evolutionary adaptations. However, different populations and species often respond differentially to the same environmental change, potentially altering their evolutionary trajectories. For instance, some organisms flourish in new environments, whereas others go extinct. What factors determine individual and population-level responses, and what are the... Continue Reading →

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What to do when life gets costly?

Organisms have to deal with many kinds of costs, but dissecting and quantifying each of them, and how they affect adaptation and evolution, is tricky. This is especially true when some costs are "internal" (e.g., due to deleterious mutations) and some are "external" (environmental). In a study led by former postdoc Laasya Samhita (now Assistant... Continue Reading →

Welcome Basabi!

We are very happy that Dr Basabi Bagchi has joined the lab as a Postdoctoral fellow. For her PhD at Ashoka University, Basabi asked several interesting questions about host-pathogen interactions using flour beetles. During a short postdoctoral stint at the University of Montana, she explored cytoplasmic incompatibility in insects. In our lab, Basabi plan to... Continue Reading →

Founders shape long term population fate

The first set of findings from our long-term beetle populations are now out! In a massive effort, collating data across over 5 years, Vrinda and other lab members monitored flour beetle populations exposed to a new, poor habitat — corn flour — instead of the optimal ancestral wheat flour. While we expected some extinction, nearly all... Continue Reading →

Mutation bias shapes fitness effects

Mutations are central for evolution, and recent work has suggested that the type of mutations sampled by organisms may be important for evolution. Earlier work from our lab and that of Lindi Wahl suggested that flipping a long-term mutational bias should be generally beneficial, by allowing populations to sample unexplored mutational space. We have now... Continue Reading →

Congratulations Dr. Singhal!

Shivansh just defended his PhD thesis, summarizing nearly 6 years of hard work to understand the genomic basis of adaptation and divergence in flour beetles. Along the way, he assembled a new genome for Tribolium castaneum, picking up serious genomics chops and expertise on population genetics and flour beetle biology. Apart from his own thesis,... Continue Reading →

Welcome Adrita!

We are very happy to formally welcome Adrita as a PhD student in the lab. Adrita is trained in Microbiology from Calcutta University and has a Master’s degree in Life Science from NIT Rourkela. Adrita is currently looking at factors that facilitate the short-term emergence of antibiotic resistance. She enjoys listening to Hindustani classical music... Continue Reading →

Making mirror life is risky

Many key molecules in our cells are specific enantiomers, and their mirror image forms are not found in living beings. For instance, the sugars in DNA are all left-handed, while amino acids are right-handed. For decades, scientists have wondered whether a completely "flipped" mirror organism would be viable and how it would function. With major... Continue Reading →

Density-dependent survival is key for population growth

Some of the most famous time series in population ecology describe beautiful oscillations in population size, including our favourite flour beetles. Even in the absence of external forces (such as predation) such oscillations are not uncommon, and are typically attributed to negative density dependence. As populations become more crowded, the growth rate drops, and this... Continue Reading →

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