We are very happy that the lab now has more funds to support our work on the evolution and consequences of mutation bias, in the form of a DBT/Wellcome Trust India Alliance Senior Fellowship to Deepa. The generous funding means that we will soon be hiring two postdoctoral fellows to join our group and work... Continue Reading →
The lab had a great showing at the 2024 NCBS Annual talks, with three exciting posters from Pratibha and Harshith (Ecological drift in the flour beetle gut microbiome), Ruchith and Shazia (Mutation bias and tradeoffs), and Shivansh (The genetic basis of adaptation in flour beetles). These are all fun new stories from the lab that... Continue Reading →
We are very happy that Aakanksha Madhwal has joined the lab as a new PhD student. She has a Bachelor's degree in Microbiology from Graphic Era Deemed To Be University, Dehradun, and a Master's Degree in Biotechnology from Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi. Microorganisms have always piqued her interest, and she is curious about how these seemingly simple... Continue Reading →
In 2022, Deepa organized the ASN Vice-Presidential Symposium at the annual meeting of the Evolution societies in Cleveland, Ohio, USA. The symposium featured a set of wonderful talks by five invited speakers from across the world, analysing how genetic variation shapes adaptation. The work reported in these talks is now out in the Symposium section... Continue Reading →
We're very happy to welcome Shazia Parveen, who worked with us as a JRF for some time and has now formally joined the lab as a PhD student. Shazia has a Bachelor's degree in Biotechnology from Jamia Millia Islamia New Delhi, and an MSc in Molecular Medical Microbiology from IIT Kharagpur. She is interested in using... Continue Reading →
Happy to announce that applications are now open for the next Bangalore school on population genetics and evolution from 12–23 Feb, 2024. We welcome PhD students and postdocs interested in evolutionary biology, from India as well as other Asian and African countries. There are no participation fees, and we have some travel support for international... Continue Reading →
Several years ago, Arun Prakash and Imroze Khan set up an ambitious experimental evolution study in the lab, infecting populations of flour beetles with the pathogen Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt). They found that different selection regimes led to the evolution of mutually exclusive immune responses – beetles either evolved better basal resistance to Bt, or immune priming... Continue Reading →
Our paper describing the evolutionary effects of shifts in mutation bias is now published! We started out by asking if mutation spectrum could alter the fitness effects of new mutations in E. coli. To our surprise, we found a consistent effect across many environments, but could not attribute the difference to any particular properties of... Continue Reading →
