Our recently completed multi-year project suggests that there is no straight answer to this question! We sampled the leaves of different rice varieties across 3 years, finding that bacterial communities that live inside vs. on the surface of leaves differ in many ways, and over time. As expected from greater exposure to environmental influences (including... 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 →
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 →
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 →
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 →
AdaptationLab 