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 →
Read Laasya's short interview about her work and career goals, and our paper on the phenotypic effects of mistranslation.
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.
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 →
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!
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 →
Towards the end of this year, long-term lab members left for new adventures; coincidentally both going to Germany! Mrudula is starting as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Cologne, and Parth is jumping into a PhD program at the University of Dusseldorf. We'll miss them both, and are glad that we at least managed... Continue Reading →
Laasya’s single-author review on how non-genetic changes can contribute to evolution is now out in Current Genetics! Transfer of information in biology usually occurs from nucleic acids to protein, but not vice-versa (The Central Dogma). Any molecular alteration that does not change the DNA sequence (genotype) is generally short lived, and is thought to have... Continue Reading →
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