This year Dhara Mehrotra spent time as our Artist-in-Residence outreach program at National Centre for Biological Sciences (NCBS).

If you were to ask if we should grow more forests, a typical reply would be, “Of course, forests help fight global warming” or that “forests harbour life.” However, did you know that “growing” artificial forests, which replace the existing landscape, is not always the best of choices? Yes, although it seems counter-intuitive, artificial forests may sometimes do more harm than good.

Researchers set out to understand how the island’s biodiversity might have been influenced by its shared geological history with India, by studying the evolutionary history of the common house gecko and its close relatives in India and Sri Lanka.

If you've ever trained for a track event, you know there are two ways to run. Training for a long distance running event means you have to run economically – wasted movement costs valuable energy. Sprinting, on the other hand, focuses on powerful movements made with intense effort.

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

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.