While collecting ants for his MSc thesis project on ant communities in the Andaman Islands, Gaurav Agavekar found two species of ants from the genus Tetramorium that turned out to be new to science. Along with Evan Economo's lab at OIST Japan, he recently described these species in a paper in PeerJ. The new species... Continue Reading →
New paper: A link between early inflammation, immune function and ageing
All organisms age. One prominent hypothesis suggests that infections experienced early in life accelerate ageing. In collaboration with Jens Rolff, Imroze tested this idea in mealworm beetles (Tenebrio molitor). He found that young beetles injected with bacterial cell components mounted an immune response that damaged their vital organs – Malpighian tubules, equivalent to kidneys –... Continue Reading →
New paper: Adaptation via synonymous mutations
Update: Here is a really nice graphic that Kruttika and Gaurav made, that captures some of the fun results from this work. Our work showing rapid, parallel adaptation in Methylobacterium extorquens is now out online on the MBE website. The work represents a huge team effort from members of my former postdoctoral lab and my... Continue Reading →
New paper from the lab
Imroze and Arun's paper describing immunosenescence in flour beetles will be out in the January 2016 issue of the Journal of Animal Ecology! You can find the paper here. Here's a brief summary of the work described in the paper. In many animals, immune function decreases with age so that older animals are more likely... Continue Reading →
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