In a series of collaborative studies, researchers from the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) and National Centre for Biological Sciences (NCBS), Bengaluru; Villanova University, USA; and the Natural History Museum (NHM), London, have discovered eight new species of bent-toed geckos from Northeast India.

In a recent study, Mr Joseph Thottacherry of NCBS, along with his collaborators from other Indian and Spanish institutes, has tried to understand how cells maintain their shapes in spite of expelling material from their membrane.

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.