Kavita Jain (JNCASR) and I have organized a series of ICTS Schools on Population Genetics and Evolution since 2014. To help participants get better prepared for the next school (scheduled in 2020), we are now introducing a preparatory school in Feb 2019. The intensive 1-week school will introduce biologists to key mathematical tools, and non-biologists... Continue Reading →
Vrinda and Swastika's paper on larval food choice behaviour in response to prior experience with new foods is out in Ecological Entomology! Several decades ago, it was observed that the juvenile (or larval) stages of several insects change their feeding preference in response to prior experience ("induction of preference"). We explored this trait in the ecological... Continue Reading →
Gaurav’s large-scale phylogenetic analysis of bacterial tRNA modification systems is now published in MBE! An important property of tRNA molecules is the ability for wobble base pairing. Apart from the widely known GU wobble pairing, chemically modified bases in a tRNA extend wobble base pairing rules. Such tRNA modifications therefore expand the pool of tRNA... Continue Reading →
We have another fun summer conference season lined up this year; as usual, most lab members have received travel awards. Come hear about our work if you happen to be at these meetings! Mrudula, Kruttika, Laasya, Saurabh, Joshua and I will be at the SMBE meeting in Yokohama, Japan, starting 8 July. We're all super... Continue Reading →
Congratulations to Kruttika for winning the runner-up prize for best student talk at the Biology of Butterflies meeting! She spoke about finding a new example of Wolbachia bacteria distorting the sex ratio of a butterfly. Picture: Kruttika receiving her award from Naomi Pierce.
Gaurav showing off his thesis. So exciting!
Our campus has a new outreach program under the Science and the City initiative: the BLiSc Science Cafe (BLiSc = Bangalore Life Science Cluster). I will kick off this program with a talk at MyBoTree in Kormangala, Bangalore, this coming Sunday (11 am, June 24). Come hear about the exciting world of microbes that live... Continue Reading →
Kruttika's work on the bacterial communities of butterflies is now out in the journal Royal Society Open Science! This was our first large butterfly project, and it was a lot of fun. We collaborated with Krushnamegh Kunte for this project. We chased butterflies, learned to identify different species, and combed through different host plants to find... Continue Reading →
