The fastest carnivorous plant: a small aquatic species belonging to the bladderwort genus now holds that distinction. Scientists at the National Centre for Biological Sciences (NCBS) filmed Utricularia stellaris trapping its prey and found that it was the fastest ever recorded for a carnivorous plant. The finding reaffirms that even organisms without muscle and nervous systems can evolve mechanisms that make them fast enough to outsmart prey with advanced sensorimotor capacities.

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.

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.

Bacteria: one of the most abundant and well-studied organisms. But a finding published in Nature Communications today makes one wonder: do we really know them that well? Despite bacteria being the focus of profuse research, scientists have only now discovered an entirely new form of gene regulation in the bacterium Escherichia coli. The discovery of this new system provides valuable information on bacteria which are often used as model systems to study topics ranging from cell functioning to human diseases.

The Royal Society elected NCBS director K. VijayRaghavan a Fellow of the Society on 19^th April 2012. Out of six scientists of Indian origin elected as Fellows this year, VijayRaghavan is the only one based in India.

Just as banks store away only the most valuable possessions in the most secure safes, cells could also be prioritising which genes to guard most closely. A study published yesterday in Nature shows that bacteria have evolved mechanisms that protect important genes from random mutation, effectively reducing the risk of self-destruction. The study answers a question that has been debated for half a century and could provide insights into how mutations that cause diseases including cancers, arise.

Scientists studying Alzheimer's, amyloidosis or similar diseases caused by malformed proteins won't have to sift through pages of literature anymore. Searching for information including the structures of proteins involved in diseases like these is now easy, thanks to 3DSwap, an online database developed by a team of researchers at NCBS. 3DSwap is a freely-accessible database of proteins recorded in diseases caused due to protein malformation.

Indians are making a lot of money; it is all over the news. Corporate houses are merging and splitting, changing hands and making it to Fortune 500 lists. But is any of this money channelled to scientific research - to drive the innovation that has the capacity to transform the nation? Unlike many institutes abroad, Indian research centres are largely dependant on government grants and there is limited philanthropic funding. Well aware of this situation, Dr. Romesh Wadhwani, Chairperson and CEO of the Symphony Technology Group is determined to make a change. In 2000 he established the Wadhwani Foundation, which will distribute 80% of his wealth to welfare and development projects. As announced during his recent visit to our campus, the beneficiaries now include Indian research institutes such as NCBS and Indian Institute of Technology, Mumbai.