The study, published in Ecology and Evolution is co-authored by researchers at the National Centre for Biological Sciences (NCBS), Bengaluru and senior forest officers of the Rajasthan Forest Department. The matrilineages were corroborated with the help of records of family trees maintained by the forest department.

If you’ve ever tried to swat a fly, you know how hard it is to follow its movements as it ducks and weaves around to escape. You can easily appreciate that a scientist trying to observe and understand the behavior of insects in the natural world has their work cut out.

“Collecting and sequencing the whole genome with shed hairs of tigers is something that has been done for the first time,” said Anubhab Khan, who led the study done by the National Centre for Biological Sciences (NCBS), Bengaluru, in collaboration with the Rajasthan Forest Department and Medgenome Labs.

Butterflies of India (IFoundButterflies.org), a website launched by Kunte in 2010, crowd-sources images to map and document butterflies in India.

“The world will not be inherited by the strongest; it will be inherited by those most able to change.”

This quote by evolutionary biologist Charles Darwin is quite appreciable in the microscopic world of bacteria and viruses.

Bacteria, in the natural world are swamped by a myriad of environmental stressors. Changes at the genetic level often beget bacterial adaptations to these challenges, helping them find a fine balance between growth and stress tolerance.

Speaking at a webinar on ‘Vaccines for the 21st century” organised by the CovidGyan as part of its WebGyan series on Thursday, Dr.Kang stressed the need to deeply understand immune responses against new vaccines to ensure that people were protected against increased future risk.

Prof. Rob Phillips (Caltech) took the audience through a fascinating journey of viral dynamics in the webinar, ‘Where is Euler Now That We Need Him?’. Prof. Phillips used questions which have arisen in biology and physics to illuminate the current systems of understanding the SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) pandemic. He dedicated the talk to an analogy between the history of celestial mechanics and the history of “viral mechanics”, harkening back to the 1750s when Euler, d’Alembert and Clairaut were engaged in a careful study of the lunar orbit.

IIT Bombay researchers have developed an algorithm which can be used to help conduct pooled testing of samples for COVID-19. In order to validate this protocol – known as Tapestry Pooling – in vitro experiments using synthetic RNA and DNA fragments have been carried out by NCBS and inStem, Bengaluru, and Wyss Institute of Biologically Inspired Engineering, U.S. Further validation using clinical samples is under way.

“ADAAB, the whole world is gripped by coronavirus and most important in the fight against it is correct news and information,” Manal Shakeel, doing her PhD in Biology, tells her Urdu audience on YouTube. She is among the 15 researchers from National Centre for Biological Sciences (NCBS), Bengaluru, who are reaching out to the vernacular audience with information on the spread of Covid-19, while trying to dispel myths around it.