In the last month three NCBS students added their names to the Centre’s honour roll of prize-winning conference presenters.  Manivannan S. from Gaiti Hasan’s calcium signaling group won one of the best poster awards at the 43rd Annual Meeting of the Japanese Society of Developmental Biologists, held in Kyoto.  Girish Arjun Punjabi and Shivani Jadeja, respectively, won first and joint second prizes for best talks at the first Student Conference on Conservation Science (SCCS), Bangalore. They were reporting the results of research projects done within the M.Sc Wildlife Conservation programme run at NCBS in conjunction with the Wildlife Conservation Society-India and the Centre for Wildlife Studies.

Imagine a computer as sophisticated as is currently possible - a vast array of silicon-based interconnecting pathways. Even this would still be a primitive device compared to a mammalian Central Nervous System (CNS). The fundamental units of the CNS, the neurons, interact at junctions called synapses through their branched projections, the dendrites. The accurate and precise development of the branching patterns formed by dendrites is thus essential for the emergence of a functional network of neurons.

A team of developmental biologists at NCBS-TIFR Bangalore (Ajeet Singh, K. VijayRaghavan and Veronica Rodrigues) has recently identified a neuron in the CNS of the fruit fly Drosophila that can be used as a model to study the growth and refinement of dendritic patterns during development. The results were published in the journal Development (see Abstract here). Their wide-ranging study identified many factors that play a part in dendritic regulation, but most interestingly they found that the architecture of the dendrites in the adult nerve was determined by the nerve having the appropriate activity and inputs in the larval stage. The study indicates that neuronal development in Drosophila is more similar to that of vertebrates than was previously thought. There are contributions by the ensemble of Nature and Nurture - genetic factors as well as environmental cues.

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.

Individuals with FXS, which is caused by a mutation in a gene on the X chromosome, suffer from a wide range of problems, such as learning disabilities, attention deficit, seizures, anxiety and mood instability, probably involving several regions of the brain. Currently there is no effective treatment for FXS and other types of autism, but helpful clues about potential drug therapy were provided by previous work that found defects in neurotransmission in the hippocampus, a region important for learning and long-term memory. These defects involve abnormal chemical signaling across the synapse - the junction between neighbouring nerves. Prof. Chattarji’s group focuses on the amygdala, a small, almond-shaped area long known as the brain’s emotional hub.

“In 2002, the world’s leaders agreed to achieve a significant reduction in the rate of biodiversity loss by 2010. Having reviewed all available evidence, including national reports submitted by Parties, this third edition of the Global Biodiversity Outlook concludes that the target has not been met. Moreover, the Outlook warns, the principal pressures leading to biodiversity loss are not just constant but are, in some cases, intensifying.”
Ban Ki-moon, Secretary General United Nations, in the Foreword to “Global Biodiversity Outlook 3”, 2010.

2010 is the UN’s International Year of Biodiversity with many celebrations and conferences all around the world aimed at increasing awareness, particularly in the political realm, of the diversity of life on earth and the challenges it faces. One of the most important IYB 2010 projects has been a thorough-as-possible review of the status of the world’s biodiversity. The results of this review were published in the 96 page document, Global Biodiversity Outlook 3, and in a recent report in the journal Science (Global Biodiversity: Indicators of Recent Declines: see Abstract here), with NCBS researcher Suhel Quader as one of the 45 contributing authors.

Overlooking 1600km of the peninsula's west coast, the Western Ghats are the most striking geographical feature of south India. With their altitudinal range (average elevation of 1200m, highest point 2695m), a latitudinal spread  of 13deg, and a 70% drop-off in monsoonal rainfall between the western and eastern slopes, it is no surprise that the variety of plants and animals supported by the Western Ghats is also extraordinary. In the Western Ghats’ many habitats, ranging from montane and tropical evergreen forests, to dry deciduous forests, to montane grasslands, one can find about 5000 plant species, 139 mammal species and over 500 different birds. The Western Ghats’ ecological significance is underscored by its designation as one of the world’s biodiversity hotspots.

More so than for most other hotspots, the impact of people on the ecology of the Western Ghats needs to be understood and managed. According to the Conservation International site, the Western Ghats have the third-highest population density of all the hotspots: 261 people per square km, which is over six times the world’s average population density. In the Western Ghats the total land area dominated by people is now about twice that of the remaining natural habitats, and the populated and natural areas are extremely interwoven in a giant, landscape-level mosaic. The special challenges of the Western Ghats, and our ignorance of how to manage human land-use in them, inspired a study just published in the journal Biological Conservation (see Abstract here), with inputs from scientists affiliated with NCBS and five other Indian and American centres (full list at bottom of article). Its first author is current NCBS graduate student M.O. Anand.

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.

As the human population continues to swell, the world's supply of freshwater dwindles. We are drawing from an already limited pool: less than one per cent of the earth’s freshwater is directly accessible, most of it locked up in glaciers and polar ice. According to the Pacific Institute, humanity uses, on average, about 7% of the available freshwater every year, a percentage that climbs to 40% in India. The volume of annual rain in many countries, including India (~ 3,000 cubic km) luckily still dwarfs human water usage (by about a factor of five in India) but this of course makes local communities anxious hostages to the rain gods.

Our increasing demand for fresh water, and our tendency to cluster ever-more densely around its sources, are not good news for freshwater habitats such as rivers and lakes. These come under a depressingly diverse range of pressures. Natural river courses are toyed with, and dammed as the ultimate insult; pollution pours in from both urban and rural practises; motorboat traffic tears at the shoreline and riverbank; and exploitative hunting and fishing can turn a waterway into a graveyard. Even the most sacred stretches of India’s revered Ganga are not spared: in Varanasi, raw sewage and industrial waste spew into the river from over 30 outlets, raising the faecal coliform count by a factor of 25, to 1.5 million counts/100ml at the city’s downstream limit, according to Mishra, 2005.

Can you remember running down a set of stairs really fast without thinking - and then wondering in amazement, “How did I do that?”. Well in a way “you” didn’t. Just as your breathing and heartbeat do not require your conscious input, the control of other rhythmic activities such as walking and running is largely automatic. This can free up your often already-overloaded conscious mind to think about more important things, for example where to run to! In any animal, the automatic component of each rhythmic motion is enabled by a specialised part of the central nervous system that functions as a “Central Pattern Generator” (CPG) for that particular motion. CPGs are a fascinating and important area of animal biology, and last year Gayatri Venkiteswaran and Gaiti Hasan of NCBS published a paper in PNAS that demonstrated a previously unrecognised feature of the nerves that directly influence the CPG that controls flight in the fruitfly, Drosophila. And, right now, the movie that illustrates the most significant findings of their study is a finalist in the competition for Drosophila Image Award of 2010, an honour awarded each year by the Genetics Society of America.

In an Indian tropical forest there are few things as distinctive and exciting as the swoosh of a hornbill flying overhead. The rushing sound of its heavy wings feels so loud and close that it captures all your attention, then leaves you relieved that the bird had no malevolent intent. Of course if you are lucky enough to also see one of India's nine hornbill species, there is excitement too, all of them being adorned with disproportionately large hooked bills, augmented yet again, in some species, by a striking bony casque.

“It was a warm day with early morning temperature around –16º C.” With such unaffected understatement so begins a description on Kulbhushansingh Suryawanshi's blog of "a day at work in the Trans-Himalaya”, detailing some of the field work of a project reported last year in Oecologica, and which was done in an M.Sc Program that NCBS runs in collaboration with the Wildlife Conservation Society-India and the Centre for Wildlife Studies.

It hints that Kullu, as he is known to his friends, had put himself in a rather extreme situation, and sometimes in field biology this must be done. Many animals, like the Bharal (the Himalayan Blue Sheep) - the focus of Kullu's study - have carved out an ecological niche that depends on their ability to survive in an abnormally harsh environment. If field biologists want to understand how an animal can do that, they must often be willing to study it on location. Moreover, to get the maximum amount of information, they need to do so, as Kullu did, when the conditions are at their most extreme, and for the Bharal that meant the depths of the Himalayan winter, when temperatures can plunge to –35º C and below.