We have a new paper this month, in Genome Biology and Evolution. This paper follows from the lab's long standing interest in codon usage bias, and describes Saurabh's analysis to understand how codon use and tRNA gene numbers vary with bacterial growth rate. Typically, highly expressed genes use specific synonymous codons more often, compared to other... Continue Reading →
Wellcome Trust/DBT India Alliance Fellowship
I am very happy to say that for the next 5 years (beginning January 2018), a large part of our work will be generously funded by a Wellcome Trust/DBT India Alliance Intermediate Fellowship Award. As part of the grant, I have an open postdoctoral position for a microbiologist or an entomologist who is interested in... Continue Reading →
Laasya and Parth win poster award
Congratulations to Laasya and Parth for winning a poster award at the 2018 NCBS Annual talks! The poster described how mistranslation seems to influence the bacterial stress response, focusing on initiator tRNA mutants.
New paper: Experimental evolution of insect immune memory
Our new paper describing Imroze and Arun's massive experiment with thousands of infected beetles was recently published online. Within about 10 generations of exposure to Bacillus thuringiensis, flour beetles evolved divergent immune responses: either improved but generalized immune resistance, or specific immune priming (memory). We think that the divergent response is driven by the frequency... Continue Reading →
Winter conference season
This winter is packed with exciting meetings! Here's the menu: Pratibha and I just returned from a fantastic SMBE satellite meeting in Kaziranga, Assam. Congratulations to Pratibha for getting a travel grant to present her work! The meeting brought together a bunch of people working on microbial evolution in natural and experimental populations. There was... Continue Reading →
Announcing the 3rd Bangalore School on Population Genetics and Evolution
The next iteration of our ICTS School on Population Genetics and Evolution is scheduled from 5-17 March 2018. We will have a great set of teachers, with topics ranging from statistical genetics, demographic dynamics, epistatis, and life history evolution. We invite applications from advanced PhD students and postdocs (deadline 15 Nov 2017). Find more information... Continue Reading →
Gaurav describes new ant species
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 →
Aparna wins award at SPEEC-Up 2017
SPEEC-Up 2017 was the first iteration of what we hope will be an annual 3-minute talk competition for students of ecology, evolution and conservation in Bangalore. The event was a lot of fun, and a great way to get introduced to a wide range of work from our neighbours. I am truly happy to have... Continue Reading →
AdaptationLab 