Apart from humans, many organisms acquire beneficial bacterial partners from the food that they eat. But what about generalists, whose diet can vary every day? We asked whether the bacteria in the diet of the red flour beetle – a grain pest found across the world – impact the beetles’ fitness in different diets. For... Continue Reading →
Shantanu's work on female colour variation in the widespread, tiny damselfly Agriocnemis pygmaea is now out! Females of this damselfly (seen at the campus pond) come in two colors: red and blue, as well as a bunch of intermediate forms. We wondered whether these colours represent allelic forms, or ontogenic (age-related) change. From laboratory studies... Continue Reading →
As the pandemic unfolded (and continues) in India, some of us from the lab joined the ISRC, a motley group of scientists across India who banded together to address various issues relevant to COVID-19. The group has created a large repository of accurate scientific information about the pandemic; busted hoaxes; organized a number of formal... Continue Reading →
Our work on ‘useful’ mistakes in bacteria (E. coli) is finally out! Laasya and Parth found that making rebel proteins not encoded by our DNA can be a good thing. In cells that frequently make mistakes, the accumulated ‘junk’ proteins end up triggering a high alert situation. This allows the cells to better deal with... Continue Reading →
Bacteria are so small and so ubiquitous that it seems like they should be found everywhere. But recent work shows that much like animals and plants, most bacteria have discrete distributions. We asked: does host association shape bacterial distribution in nature? In Pratibha's first paper from the lab, we describe how bacteria from the genus... Continue Reading →
Kruttika's work testing the impact of butterfly caterpillar microbiomes on growth and survival is published! This was a major collaborative effort with Krushnamegh Kunte, and very new kind of work for our lab. The results were puzzling because unlike patterns from other insects, butterflies seem to be just fine without their bacteria. But in conjunction... Continue Reading →
Rittik Deb and Ashwin Nair's paper on the gut bacterial communities of dragonflies is out! We sampled several species of dragonflies from different locations in India, and found that gut bacterial communities varied across host species, location, and season. For some of the dragonflies, we were also able to analyse gut contents, and found that... Continue Reading →
Kavita Jain and I are pleased to announce the fourth edition of the Bangalore School on Population genetics and Evolution. As always, we have an exciting speaker lineup, and we look forward to a group of enthusiastic participants. We invite applications from PhD students and postdocs (and exceptional MSc students) from biology, computer science, physics,... Continue Reading →
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