If you have spent some time by the pond near the main canteen on campus, you might have noticed tiny damselflies zipping along by the edge of the pond. Because they are so small, you have to look closely to see their beautiful, vivid reds and blues. What do these colours mean? Do they signal something, and to whom? As humans, we signal a lot with the colour of our clothes, and have the luxury of changing them at will. For most animals, colour is not really a behavioural choice, but reflects myriad selection pressures in their evolutionary history.

So, instead of chasing these flies through the lab all day, in a study published Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, doctoral researcher in the NICE group and first author on this study, Pavan Kaushik, tells Inverse they designed an entire virtual 3D world for just a single, small fly.

"Nothing humans have created to date has the computational prowess to navigate the world like a tiny little fly.

Researchers at the Bengaluru-based NCBS have used hair shed by tigers to identify their family relationships.
 

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.

“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.

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.

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.