Happy to announce the 2nd edition of our 1-week intensive school on population genetics and evolution in Feb 2024 at ICTS, co-organized with Kavita Jain from JNCASR Bangalore. If you are a student with a keen interest in population genetics but are relatively new to the topic, do consider applying (deadline 20 November 2022)! You'll... Continue Reading →
Synonymous variation was long thought to be neutral (invisible to selection), but in the 50 years since we first began understanding the genetic code, this view has undergone a dramatic shift. A new book on the impact of synonymous mutations (Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms: Human variation and a coming revolution in biology and medicine) includes our... Continue Reading →
The results of our field study of the impact of different Methylobacterium strains on their host rice landraces (traditionally cultivated rice varieties from Manipur) are out! We find that strains show host-specific effects (beneficial or deleterious). Though the mechanisms remain unclear still, it is clear that there is enormous potential to use beneficial host-bacterial interactions for... Continue Reading →
We are very happy that former lab member Laasya has joined Ashoka University as an Assistant Professor and will be building her group there to continue exploring themes of mistranslation and antimicrobial resistance. If you are interested in these areas of research, do consider joining her lab.
Bacteria have remarkably diverse base composition in their genomes, with many well studied cases of rapid GC reduction associated with obligate symbiosis and genome streamlining in poor environments. But we don't really understand how GC content generally changes in evolutionary time. To find out, Saurabh tested different evolutionary models of change in GC content in... Continue Reading →
This month the lab completes a decade of existence. I am proud of all the fun science we have done as a group over the years, and the myriad ways in which all of us have grown. A lot of earlier themes are wrapping up and there are new exciting directions to pursue. Onward, to... Continue Reading →
In the second installment of our series of reviews on the lab's favourite papers, Shubha Govindarajan writes about a classic paper that gave a new perspective on individual variation and tradeoffs. Read on! Fig 1 from van Noordwijk & de Jong 1986, American Naturalist Acquisition and Allocation of Resources: Their Influence on Variation in Life... Continue Reading →
We are happy to finally announce the 1st meeting of our special topic network on synthesizing micro- and macro- evolutionary processes shaping prokaryotic genomes, supported by ESEB. The meeting will be hosted at the Milner Center for Evolution at the University of Bath, UK, from 30 May to 1 June 2022. We have a great... Continue Reading →
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