In the backdrop of climate change, the National Centre for Biological Sciences, a subsidiary of Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, has taken up a study on the carbon dioxide (CO2) absorption by evergreen forests of Western Ghats.

A 30-member scientists team, led by Dr Mahesh Shankaran and Dr Jayashri Ratnam, is conducting such studies in four places across the country.

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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.

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.

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.

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.
 

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.