This post is delayed by about 10 months because we couldn't have a nice farewell for Rittik during the pandemic. But he was back in the lab for a bit and we were able to do things properly this time around. We are very happy to report that Rittik has joined as a member of... Continue Reading →
New paper: Costs and benefits of evolved immune responses
Arun's paper reporting the detailed costs and benefits of evolved immune priming is now published! In an exciting earlier study, we had found that flour beetles exposed to the pathogen Bacillus thuringiensis adapted rapidly via the evolution of either immune priming or pathogen resistance. The new work – led by Arun (now at Edinburgh University)... Continue Reading →
Laasya interviewed on Biopatrika
Read Laasya's short interview about her work and career goals, and our paper on the phenotypic effects of mistranslation.
Congratulations Dr Ravi Kumar!
We are very proud of Vrinda, who successfully defended her PhD thesis following a fantastic seminar. Vrinda worked with long-term selection lines of beetles adapting to new resources to understand the factors that explain population dynamics during adaptation.
Paper review: E coli LTEE
We're starting a series of reviews of the lab's favourite papers. Here's the first review by Shyam Buddh, featuring the famous LTEE lines. Enjoy! Dynamics of adaptation and diversification: a 10,000-generation experiment with bacterial populations R E Lenski, M Travisano Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Jul 1994, 91 (15) 6808-6814 If we classify... Continue Reading →
Congratulations, Dr Mahajan!
Saurabh successfully defended his PhD thesis, for which he analysed patterns and causes of GC content evolution and codon usage across thousands of bacteria. He gave a superb (virtual) talk, and we all celebrated his successes with a custom cake on the lawn. Congratulations, Dr Mahajan!
New paper: Mistranslation increases phenotypic variation
Our collaborative work (with Shashi Thutupalli’s lab at NCBS) on tracking mistranslation-induced phenotypic variability is now published! Protein sequences often differ because of underlying differences in DNA sequence (i.e. genetic mutations). However, making mistakes while building the protein can also introduce differences in the protein sequence, although at a low frequency. Proteins altered in this... Continue Reading →