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 →
At the Annual meeting of the Society for Molecular Biology and Evolution (SMBE), Deepa accepted the 2024 Mid-career faculty excellence award from past society President Kateryna Makova. It is an honor to receive this award, which recognizes our group's work in molecular evolution over the past few years. Read more here!
We are very happy that the lab now has more funds to support our work on the evolution and consequences of mutation bias, in the form of a DBT/Wellcome Trust India Alliance Senior Fellowship to Deepa. The generous funding means that we will soon be hiring two postdoctoral fellows to join our group and work... Continue Reading →
The lab had a great showing at the 2024 NCBS Annual talks, with three exciting posters from Pratibha and Harshith (Ecological drift in the flour beetle gut microbiome), Ruchith and Shazia (Mutation bias and tradeoffs), and Shivansh (The genetic basis of adaptation in flour beetles). These are all fun new stories from the lab that... Continue Reading →
In 2022, Deepa organized the ASN Vice-Presidential Symposium at the annual meeting of the Evolution societies in Cleveland, Ohio, USA. The symposium featured a set of wonderful talks by five invited speakers from across the world, analysing how genetic variation shapes adaptation. The work reported in these talks is now out in the Symposium section... Continue Reading →
Several years ago, Arun Prakash and Imroze Khan set up an ambitious experimental evolution study in the lab, infecting populations of flour beetles with the pathogen Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt). They found that different selection regimes led to the evolution of mutually exclusive immune responses – beetles either evolved better basal resistance to Bt, or immune priming... Continue Reading →
Our paper describing the evolutionary effects of shifts in mutation bias is now published! We started out by asking if mutation spectrum could alter the fitness effects of new mutations in E. coli. To our surprise, we found a consistent effect across many environments, but could not attribute the difference to any particular properties of... Continue Reading →
Former postdoctoral fellow Rittik Deb has joined the National Institute of Science Education and Research (NISER) Bhubaneswar as an Assistant Professor. Congratulations Rittik, and we look forward to all of the exciting discoveries that you and your group will make in the coming years!
AdaptationLab 