Scientists and researchers from the National Centre for Biological Sciences (NCBS) in Bangalore have come up with a new citizen-science repository on Indian mammals, called Mammals of India (MaOI), which is an online, peer- reviewed, freely-accessible portal that was launched late September 2018.

The grains we eat, the flowers we cherish, fruits that we use as supplements, all came from plants that have been extensively modified from their original forms in a process called domestication.  Domestication of plants and animals has been the subject of fascinating studies over the last many decades.  Domestication encompasses a broad spectrum of evolutionary changes called as “domestication syndrome” that distinguish most crops from their progenitors.  These changes may increase fitness of these plants under ideal man-made conditions, but likely decrease their fitness in the wild.  Comp

We are pleased to announce that Prof. Satyajit Mayor has signed on as an advisory member of the Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA). DORA recognizes the need to improve the ways in which the outputs of scholarly research are evaluated. It is a global initiative encompassing all scholarly disciplines and the key stakeholders include funders, publishers, professional societies, institutions, and researchers.

Animals often have to evaluate and choose between multiple food sources in their habitat, and these potentially complex decisions can have a large impact on their fitness. A paper recently published by Deepa Agashe's lab, demonstrates that experience-based plasticity of larval resource choice may strongly impact larval preference and fitness in heterogeneous habitats. The paper was published by Vrinda Ravi Kumar, Swastika Issar and Deepa Agashe, from the National Centre for Biological Sciences (NCBS).

Indian farmers usually do not wear any protective gear while spraying chemicals in fields. This exposes them to harmful toxics contained in pesticides, causing severe health impacts and even death in extreme cases. Indian scientists have now developed a protective gel to address this problem.

The gel, named poly-Oxime, has been prepared by researchers at the Institute for Stem Cell Science and Regenerative Medicine (InStem), Bangalore from a nucleophilic polymer.

A team led by Dr. Praveen Kumar Vemula from the Institute for Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine (inStem), Bengaluru, an autonomous institute under the Department of Biotechnology, used a chemical reaction to convert the ester into acid by using a catalyst to make the pesticide inactive.

   2018 seems to be a great year for the Simons Centre at NCBS in terms of collaborative science! With our faculty having embarked on various collaborative visits across our partner institutions, as well as having hosted numerous collaborators at NCBS, Bangalore this year (Prof. Stephan Herminghaus, MPI-DS, Gottingen; Prof. Frank Jülicher, MPI-PKS, Dresden; and Dr. Timothy Saunders, MBI, Singapore to name just a few), we are always looking to push the boundaries of collaborative science.


A team of researchers from the National Centre for Biological Sciences, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in India led by Dr. P.V. Shivaprasad wondered whether another type of molecular regulator, named microRNAs, also contributed to the domestication of rice. We hope that our finding promotes future research to identify other changes associated with domestication of plants, spearheading further improvement in crops for the future," states Dr. Shivaprasad.
 

We are proud to announce the election of Dr John Kuriyan (University of California, Berkeley, USA) to the prestigious National Academy of Medicine. The National Academy of Medicine is an independent organization of eminent professionals from diverse fields including health and medicine; the natural, social, and behavioural sciences; and beyond.

From Old Letters Preserved In Godrej Cabinets To One-Of-A-Kind Scientific Equipment, A Peek Inside NCBS Bengaluru’s Upcoming Scientific Archive.

The archive will be open to everyone, and its curator hopes that someday it will be part of an interconnected digital archive of science that enables storytelling across different disciplines.