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 →
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 →
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 →
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 →
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 →
Our recently completed multi-year project suggests that there is no straight answer to this question! We sampled the leaves of different rice varieties across 3 years, finding that bacterial communities that live inside vs. on the surface of leaves differ in many ways, and over time. As expected from greater exposure to environmental influences (including... Continue Reading →
A new study led by Tapomoy Bhattacharjee's group shows that rods vs. cocci grow in distinct ways in porous 3D matrices, and these differences make rods more robust to increasing matrix viscosity. Bacteria in natural habitats likely live in such matrices; indeed, the bacteria used in this study were isolated from flour beetle guts in our... Continue Reading →
Bacterial genomes experience lots of mutations that result from a complex mix of DNA damage, errors made by DNA polymerase, and errors repaired or made by repair enzymes. Do these processes leave a tell-tale signature in the genome, and can we use it to infer which processes were most important? A new paper in Genome... Continue Reading →
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