The Bangalore Life Science Cluster campus hosted a unique event celebrating 30 years of the Department of Biotechnology and announcing the launch of a new EMBO-DBT partnership for funding Indian researchers.

The campus recently announced the launch of a major new collaborative initiative centred around the use of stem cell technology in research, diagnostics and therapeutics at an event held at the Bangalore Life Science Cluster campus.

How precise is life? In this visually compelling and thought-provoking talk, "accidental biologist" Mukund Thattai sets out to answer this question. He explores the theoretical concept of exactness through concrete examples such as a golf ball, a spacecraft, and one's own palms. Concluding with a vivid analogy of a street painter, Dr. Thattai leaves his audience with a sense of wonder. This presentation was featured at an INK Salon, "Exploring Excellence", at the National Centre for Biological Sciences in December 2015.

Karl Deisseroth, the D. H. Chen Professor of Bioengineering and of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University visited the National Centre for Biological Sciences (NCBS), Bangalore, while he was in the city as the featured speaker for the Cell Press-TNQ India Distinguished Lectureship Series 2016.

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.