The first set of findings from our long-term beetle populations are now out! In a massive effort, collating data across over 5 years, Vrinda and other lab members monitored flour beetle populations exposed to a new, poor habitat — corn flour — instead of the optimal ancestral wheat flour. While we expected some extinction, nearly all... Continue Reading →
Our long-dreamt-of project on understanding the effects of widely varying tRNA gene copy number is finally complete! In a new paper, we describe the growth consequences of altering redundancy in the bacterial translation machinery. We find that the costs and benefits of redundancy vary with the possible growth rate, i.e. it is nutrient-driven. This was... 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 →
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 →
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 →
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 →
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 →
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 →
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