We said a fond farewell to Imroze Khan, the first postdoc from the lab. Over the last 4 years or so, Imroze initiated and led work on the ecology and evolution of insect immune function. He is now an Assistant Professor at Ashoka University, where he will continue to work with insect life history and... 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 →
Welcome to Deepa Agashe’s lab at the National Centre for Biological Sciences (NCBS), Bangalore!
Organisms often face new, changing or otherwise challenging environments, which can drive evolutionary adaptations. However, different populations and species often respond differentially to the same environmental change, potentially altering their evolutionary trajectories. For instance, some organisms flourish in new environments, whereas others go extinct. What factors determine individual and population-level responses, and what are the... Continue Reading →
NCBS Science Day
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 →
New paper: Immune priming responses vary across beetle populations
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 →
Poster awards for Kruttika and Laasya
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 →
Symposium on the Genetics of Adaptation
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 →
New paper: Testing for selection on Shine-Dalgarno-like motifs in prokaryotes
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 →
