Raghu Padinjat is a Doctor-turned-Researcher and Wellcome Trust-DBT India Alliance Senior Research Fellow at NCBS, whose group studies information transfer mediated by lipid molecules. His group uses the fruitfly Drosophila as a model system to investigate key, evolutionarily conserved components of signal transduction that could mirror equivalent pathways in mammalian systems, with the hope that these studies will translate into discoveries of biomedical relevance.

The National Centre for Biological Sciences held its much-awaited yearly event, the Annual Talks from 11^th to 13^th January this year.

The NCBS Annual talks for 2016 will be held from 11^th to13^th January. A full schedule for the presentations this year can be found here.

TheHindu

The campus extends a warm welcome to Shashi Thutupalli, the newest faculty member joining NCBS. He will be affiliated with the Theory and Modelling group, and with the Simons Centre at NCBS. During his PhD, Shashi worked on studying pattern formation in Min proteins that influence division in bacteria.

Sunaina Surana, a former PhD student from the National Centre for Biological Sciences (NCBS), Bangalore, has won an Eli Lilly and Company Asia Outstanding Thesis Award for 2014. Sunaina's thesis titled "A framework to apply DNA nanodevices to a multicellular model organism" dealt with testing the operation of a DNA nanomachine which senses pH changes in a live organism - the roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans.

This year, Dr. Satyajit Mayor's team from the National Centre for Biological Sciences (NCBS), Bangalore, was selected by the American Society for Cell Biology (ASCB) to star in a Celldance video that features their work on cell membrane organisation. Celldance Studios (ASCB's Public information Committee) invited Dr. Mayor's lab to send them a rough-cut video highlighting their work.

A science exhibition on the move? It's a fantastic idea that has been travelling on the Indian railway tracks for seven years. The Science Express is a unique moving science exhibition mounted on a 16-coach AC train that was first flagged off in 2007 by the then Prime Minister of India, Dr. Manmohan Singh and German Chancellor Dr. Angela Merkel.

It's dinnertime, and the smell of delicious food makes your tummy rumble. However, it's dark because of a powercut and you can't see very clearly. What do you do? Raise your head, sniff, and follow the delectable smells to where the food is? Or should you just take a guess and peek into the kitchen, or the dining room or the veranda, which are the likeliest places for dinner to be served? A recent study shows that the latter method - dubbed "run-and-scan" - may actually be a more efficient way to find your target than just following your nose.

Research is a global activity not restricted by geographical boundaries and talented researchers with good ideas need research funding that helps their work transcend borders and further knowledge.