A team comprising inStem's Kouichi Hasegawa, AstraZeneca's Vasan Sambandamurthy and Susanta Ghosh of the National Institute of Malaria Research has won the Grand Challenges Explorations grant awarded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Hasegawa, Sambandamurthy, Ghosh and Varadharajan Sundaramurthy (NCBS) propose to develop an assay of the liver-stage (one of the several life stages) of the malaria-causing protozoan Plasmodium vivax. They will use the latest techniques in stem cell biology to develop this new assay to make it suitable for drug screening. With this venture, Hasegawa, Sambandamurthy and their team hope to throw light on the poorly-understood biology of P. vivax. The new information they generate will bring science many steps closer to controlling and ultimately eradicating P. vivax-driven malaria, a dreaded disease afflicting people in many tropical countries.

Yamuna Krishnan, Associate Professor at NCBS, has been awarded a Human Frontier Science Program (HFSP) program grant. Krishnan and her team of collaborators including Professors Ludger Johannes (Curie Institute, France), Mark Bathe (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge) and John Ipsen (University of Southern Denmark) will examine the mechanisms of endocytosis (the process of cells absorbing molecules by engulfing them) and associated cell signaling using innovative nanoprobes.

Kulbhushansingh Suryawanshi, alumnus of NCBS's Post Graduate Program in Wildlife Biology and Conservation, has won the 2013 Southwood Prize. His article "People, predators and perceptions: patterns of livestock depredation by snow leopards and wolves" has been selected as the best paper by a young author in the Journal of Applied Ecology as a part of the British Ecology Society's annual award selection.

NCBS Senior research scholar Sunaina Surana won the Malhotra Weikfield Foundation NanoScience Fellowship Award for the year 2013 in the 6^th Bangalore INDIA NANO Awards held on 5^th and 6^th December 2013. She received the award from Bharat Ratna Dr. C. N. R. Rao. Surana won the Fellowship for her doctoral work which she summarized in her poster A DNA Nanomachine Maps Spatiotemporal pH Changes in a Multicellular Living Organism at the event.

Pirates shuddered at the thought of black spots - they signified your imminent bloody demotion from pirate hierarchy. But for ecologists, the recently released Black Spot Leaf Area Calculator is a cause for celebration. Developed by NCBS doctoral students Varun Varma and Anand M. Osuri, Black Spot quantifies the surface area of an individual leaf. Leaf area measurements are used to derive a number of metrics used extensively in ecological studies.

Dhiraj Bhatia, doctoral student of NCBS Assistant Professor Yamuna Krishnan from 2007 to 2013, has won the First Prize in the Eli Lilly and Company Asia Outstanding Thesis Award for this year. His thesis titled Icosahedral DNA nanocapsules for targeted functional bioimaging in cellulis and in vivo explores structural DNA nanotechnology, a field of nano-research which utilizes the basic principles of DNA structure to create complex systems and devices that have extensive scientific and technological applications.

Fundamental science has yielded a plethora of miraculous medical applications and yet, not enough.

The fragmented forests of the night might soon be darker places, with fewer tigers to brighten them. How is this possible when recent census reports show rising tiger numbers in India? A study by scientists from the NCBS and Cardiff University shows that mere counts are not enough. Current tiger populations in India have lost 93% of their former genetic variation, information coded in genes, vital to species' survival. Also, the populations are not interbreeding like they used to, becoming isolated in fragmented habitats. The authors warn that this motif could portend decline, even extinction, of the endangered big cat in India.

One and a half million: The estimated number of deaths caused by mosquito-borne diseases every year across the world. Prevention is fundamental to curbing these diseases, and doctors recommend the use of nets and vaccines, as well as repellants, which deter mosquitoes by interfering with their sense of smell. Scientists at the National Centre for Biological Sciences (NCBS) have now discovered 110 new proteins in three mosquito species - proteins belonging to a group critical to mosquito olfaction. Repellants targetting this larger group of proteins may function better than existing ones, decreasing instances of dreaded diseases such as dengue and malaria.