Our campus recently hosted an open Science day, when hundreds of school students visited the campus and explored exhibits set up by students and postdocs from many labs. All accounts suggest this was a lot of fun for everyone. Here is an article describing the events. Here are some pictures of our lab's tables showcasing... Continue Reading →
Traditionally, immune memory was thought to be restricted to vertebrates; such adaptive immunity is the reason why early vaccination protects us from later infection. However, a large body of recent work suggests that many insects also show a form of immune memory, whereby exposure to a low dose of a pathogen improves an individual's response... Continue Reading →
Our campus recently hosted a conference on Conflict and Cooperation in Cellular Populations (CCCP), featuring a wonderfully diverse set of talks and participants alike. Kruttika presented a poster summarizing her results on the bacterial communities of butterflies, and Laasya put up a last-minute poster on the benefits of altered initiator tRNA content in E. coli.... Continue Reading →
I am pleased to announce a symposium on the genetic bases of adaptation and evolution, co-organized with my colleagues Gaiti Hasan and Krushnamegh Kunte. The meeting (28 Nov - 2 Dec at NCBS) will bring together evolutionary and development biologists, geneticists and theoreticians. Together, we will aim to synthesize current understanding of and future goals... Continue Reading →
Gaurav's analysis of the occurrence of Shine-Dalgarno-like motifs in prokaryotic coding regions has just been published in GBE. This is the first bioinformatics analysis we've done, and we are pretty pleased with the paper! Bioinformatics analyses of bacterial genomes have uncovered interesting patterns of specific sequence features. Although it is tempting to invoke selection, it... Continue Reading →
We've been busy! Here is some good news and fun plans for the summer. Many of us will be zipping across the world to present our work at conferences. If you happen to spot us, do come up to chat! Gaurav, Vrinda and Saurabh successfully defended their thesis proposals and are now officially stamped and certified... Continue Reading →
Ashwin's Master's thesis work on the gut bacterial communities of dragonflies has been published in Current Science. The paper is highlighted in the "In this issue" section of the journal and supported by a Cover image of a Globe Skimmer (Pantala flavescens) by Shantanu. Good work, both! In this paper, we describe culturable gut bacterial... Continue Reading →
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 →
AdaptationLab 