Ashwin and Swastika recently finished their Master’s theses from VIT (Vellore) and TERI University (New Delhi), after spending a semester in our lab working on their final thesis projects.
Ashwin compared cultivable gut bacteria across nine species of dragonflies, documenting tremendous gut bacterial diversity in the group with very little overlap between conspecifics from different populations.
Swastika compared small peptides in palatable and unpalatable butterflies and found that a recently reported cone snail toxin (conotoxin) from a South east Asian butterfly species does not occur in the corresponding Indian subspecies.
Congratulations to both!
AdaptationLab 