As in many parts of the world, soil salinity is a chronic condition in cultivable lands across most of India. Water provided by irrigation is saltier than rain, and so increased dependence on irrigation, and inadequate drainage systems, are causing soil salt to build up to toxic levels. Plant scientists are trying to develop crop varieties and management strategies that lead to higher salt tolerance. Pannaga Krishnamurthy and M.K. Matthew, from NCBS and their international colleagues* recently developed an elegant and practical technique to induce salt tolerance in rice, reported in the Journal of Experimental Botany.

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! 

The NCBS news site has just celebrated its first year of existence, so it is time to take a closer look at what was achieved in 2010. The interest in the news site has been much greater than I would have ever expected. We have been monitoring its access using Google Analytics, which tells us that overall there were 95,007 pageviews in 2010, from 28,704 visits. The average visit lasted 3:24 minutes and perused 3.31 pages. Visitors logged in from 115 countries including such exotic locations as Guinea-Bissau, Kiribati and Côte d’Ivoire. The cities tally was even more remarkable - 1,518 - and many of the place names also tantalise as travel destinations: San Cristobal de la Laguna (Tenerife), Dnepropetrovsk (Ukraine), and Steamboat Springs (USA). I see there is an obvious need to extend the evaluation of our reader base by some on-location reporting!

Remember the last monsoon drizzle and the smell from the moist soil, or that moment when you discovered the gas was leaking in your kitchen? These examples tell us that we can differentiate between a variety of odors and their intensities. We possess this ability because olfactory receptor neurons (ORNs) in our nose can sense different odorants, just our tongue’s taste buds can detect different flavours. How does this smell sense develop? Do we ‘learn’ to smell and discern different odors and their intensities through experience or are these abilities that we are born with? Or is it a combination of both processes? If learning is involved, at which development stage do we ‘learn’? These are some of the questions central to understanding the experience-dependent modification of animal behavior.

A team of neuroscientists, led by Prof. Sumantra Chattarji at the National Centre for Biological Sciences, Bangalore has identified  previously unrecognised synaptic defects in an area of the brain that is involved in the debilitating emotional symptoms of Fragile X Syndrome (FXS), the leading genetic cause of autism and mental retardation. The study is of potential therapeutic significance because it also shows that even a relatively brief pharmacological treatment is capable of correcting some of these defects in mice that were genetically engineered to model FXS. The work, done together with collaborators at New York University, will be reported in the online early edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences the week of June 7-11.

Go to Lead Story Graphics I Jan-April 2010

I must admit I have often doubted whether humans are psychologically equipped to take on challenges like overpopulation and global warming. These problems require cooperation on a grand scale, something that our evolutionary history, most of it spent living in tribes, might not have prepared us for. But I was heartened to find that this bleak outlook is out of sync with recent findings of Indian biologists, including some from NCBS, who have examined the nature and genetic basis of social adaptivity in some of our primate cousins, most particularly the Bonnet Macaques of southern India. Their results, including a paper just published in Behavior Genetics (see Abstract here), also made me aware of an idea that is now gaining momentum in human psychology: that as a species we possess more psychological flexibility than previously thought, and that many of our apparent weaknesses are actually indicators of our species’ remarkable capacity to cope with change. Maybe we are not as narrowly hardwired as many of us have believed.