With the Annual Talks finishing two days back, I sent out an email to our student, junior research felllow and postdoc mailing lists asking for comments. I have compiled the responses to date, while things are still fresh in our memory. One question focused on the new conference-style format: instead of every PI giving a talk, about half the faculty did, and there were also outside speakers. Please use the comment section below this article to add any further thoughts! All photos are by me, and are from the final day's poster session.

What were you favourite talks?

* I found Benny Shilo's talk good mainly because I could relate it to my research work. I also found Nicolas' talk and work very interesting though I don't do anything related.

* Favourite talks: Nicolas Gompel (really interesting work), Jayant (introduced comments which made his talk lively), Krushnamegh (hearing him for the first time) and Pedro (very different work and model system, also highly organized presentation) in that order.

In March this year the Indian news media reported the onfield death, by cardiac arrest, of 28-year-old Bangalore footballer D. Venkatesh. Many young athletes die like this every year - recent victims have included stars of the European soccer scene and American basketball. In most cases, these deaths are due to an inherited form of the disease, hypertrophic cardiomyopathy. Basically, the heart muscle gets too big for its own good. Its muscular walls lose the flexibility needed for normal pumping, and when the demand for blood flow jumps too high - most commonly while exercising - the hypertrophic heart cannot keep up. And the problem is not limited to athletes. It can also strike the more sedentary among us.

Scientists at NCBS and inStem, Bangalore, are trying to understand the underlying biology of inherited cardiac hypertrophy (HCM), and also the converse disease, in which the heart muscles thin out (dilated cardiomyopathy, DCM). In each disease, the most common genetic cause is a mutation in one of the proteins that comprise the cellular machinery for muscle contraction (see figure). The net outcome of any individual mutation - either a hyper- or hypo-trophic heart - depends on whether muscle contraction is increased or decreased by the change in the mutated protein. But how that increase or decrease in efficiency is brought about remains unclear.

NCBS microscopists are invited to submit several of your images and/or digital video clips to the 2012 Olympus BioScapes Digital Imaging Competition. As indicated by its title, the compettion will honour extraordinary microscope images of life science subjects. Up to five images, videos or image sequences can be entered per person, and you do not have to be a user of Olympus equipment to join in the fun. Entries for the contest can be uploaded through a web browser directly to the Olympus servers at the following URL:

http://www.olympusbioscapes.com/enter.asp

You have exactly one month to hunt through your archives, or capture some dazzling new images. The deadline for new entries is Tuesday, October 2, 2012.

The winning photos of the competition are tentatively scheduled to be published in Scientific American and the photographers will receive substantial material rewards. First prize will be Olympus microscope or camera equipment valued at $5,000. Nine additional winners will also receive valuable prizes from Olympus.  Winners will be notified in late October, and publicly announced in December, 2012.

A cut finger calls into action a crew of repair cells - macrophages - that crawl amoeba-like towards the wound. To drag itself forward a macrophage repeatedly anchors, then detaches, its advancing membranous fringe, to and from, the surrounding matrix. This feat is just one of many activities made possible by the cell's ability to enrich selected areas of its outer membrane with specialized proteins. For example, the macrophage's moving fringe is enriched in the protein integrin, which can link the membrane to the matrix. How such localized enrichment occurs within the broad expanse of the cell's membrane has remained unclear. Now however a team of researchers at the National Centre for Biological Science and the Raman Research Institute, Bangalore, believe they have the answer. In a recent paper in the journal Cell (Gowrishankar et al., 2012) they have proposed, and tested, a model that, unlike previous models, explains how enrichment could be an active process, and thus controllable by the cell.

Shachi, tell us how you got into the sort of science you do?

I joined my integrated Masters in chemistry, but that was incidental. I became interested in physical chemistry in my final year because I liked the more quantitative aspects of it. During my Masters thesis project I got interested in doing theory and computation. So, that was the direction I decided to pursue when I joined Caltech for my PhD. By training I'm a theoretical physical chemist though I did do a few biochemistry related courses in my undergraduate years. But all through my PhD I was doing very non-biological research, looking at electron transfer at metal surfaces.

Vatsala Thirumalai, a recent addition to the NCBS faculty line-up, can barely remember a time when she wasn't fascinated by neuroscience. In the interview below she tells how she is particularly interested in how the growth of the nervous system is coupled to the overall growth of an animal. A humble person, Vatsala explains her own growth as a developmental biologist largely in terms of the wonderful mentors she has had throughout her career.

G: How did you get into science?

V: I really was interested in neuroscience from the very beginning, that's what brought me into science. The interest in neuroscience came from two or three different avenues. One was that I liked biology a lot but if you looked in high school biology textbooks, then in physiology there are lessons on how respiration works, how circulation works, how the kidney works, and all that, but when you go to the nervous system, there was nothing really given in the textbooks. They only covered that simple monosynaptic reflex arc - you hit your kneecap and your leg flies up. And then they describe the different regions of the brain, cerebrum, cerebellum, spinal cord and so on. But that was about it.  They never told you what was really going on in these brain regions, in the type of detail you would find for, say, the circulatory system. You know: all the chambers of the heart and how the flow goes from one to the next, through the lung, the oxygenation. When I asked my teacher Ms. Getsie about it, she told me that that was because we didn't know much about how the brain works. That piqued my interest in neuroscience. And on top of that philosophically I was interested in the nature of thoughts, why do we have thoughts, and what are they made of, is there a soul etc etc.,  so I really wanted to follow neurobiology and be a scientist.

The last NCBS photo competition was such a great success, both in terms of participation and quality, that we have decided to go for broke with a competition every month! Upi has been thinking deeply about this and has come up with some inspired ways to highlight the superior lenscraft of our campus folk -- and to reward the winners in a way we know they will appreciate. Photos that win an award will be printed up on a grand scale, and gloriously framed, all at NCBS's expense, and then granted positions of honour in the NCBS Reception area. After a month, when it comes time for the next batch of winners to take their turn in the limelight, the departing masterpieces will be gifted to their creators.

Aswin Sai Narain Seshasayee has recently returned to his favourite place in the world, south India, to take up a faculty position at NCBS. In the interview below, Aswin tells how his interests in genomics and bacteria were initiated, how his career took him from Chennai to Cambridge, and what he thinks about his current research on global regulators of transcription in the bacterium E. coli.

Hi Aswin. Could you tell us a bit about your early life and how you got into science?

I was born and brought up in Chennai. My parents moved there in the 70s, well before I was born in 1983. I went to the local school, but moved to a bigger school when I was 11. It had a more modern approach - less mugging up!