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 →
Rittik was chosen as a runner-up for the first set of Ben Barres Spotlight awards, and will receive research funds. Rittik will use the funds to determine the molecular basis of assortative mating in laboratory-evolved populations of flour beetles. Congratulations, Rittik!
We are off to various conferences this year. Come listen to our talks, visit our posters, and talk science! Aparna is already at Evolution 2019, to talk about the role of microbiomes during host adaptation in the Hamilton Award Symposium. We are rather proud that Aparna was selected to present as a finalist! She will... Continue Reading →
Here's the latest from Imroze and Arun. A couple years ago we had found surprising levels of variability in immune memory ("priming"), across 10 wild-collected flour beetle populations (Khan et al 2016, Ecology and Evolution). In our new follow-up paper, we figured out what may explain this variation, by systematically analysing change in various fitness... Continue Reading →
Dr. Sane defending her PhD cake
