MIRA LAB

Very happy that we received one of the 10 IPSN catalytic grants from WHO, for an ambitious attempt to link environmental with clinical AMR.  We will now foray more deeply into public health problems, using our basic science expertise to try and bridge some gaps. https://www.who.int/news/item/26-11-2024-international-pathogen-surveillance-network-announces-first-recipients-of-grants-to-better-understand-disease-threats We are collaborating with Shraddha Karve (Ashoka), Mahesh Dharne (NCL, Pune), Priyanki

As the lab navigates its second year, Aabeer and Kushal will present their work at ISEB-5, the upcoming meeting of evolutionary biologists in India. If you attend, do walk over and talk with them! Harshit and I will be at IISER Pune on 27th and 28th September for the Rockefeller foundation/APSI meeting, and I will be at NCBS,

Very happy that our commentary about GXE interactions in AMR is out in Proceedings of the Royal Society B! Aabeer and I discuss the implications of a very interesting study by Soley et al which appeared last year in the same journal. How well do we detect and quantify AMR across different environments? Can we generalize patterns of

Our first lab paper is out! This one will always be memorable. It details a protocol and we thank JoVE for including it in a special issue on AMR. It is a joint effort by Jyostna, Sreya, Harshit and Gulafsha, detailing a protocol for enhanced extraction of low molecular weight DNA from the environment. We came up with

The year ended on a wonderful note. Deeply grateful to SMBE for awarding Shraddha Karve and myself a generous grant, leading to the SMBE regional meeting in India at Dehradun this year! Titled ‘Molecular mechanisms in evolution’, we truly enjoyed organizing it and hope the attendees felt the same way. The serene surroundings and great science came together

We now have the SERB start-up grant for work that will explore links between mistranslation and AMR- yay! Plus, we are very grateful to Axis bank for supporting our work on AMR: environmental surveillance as well as laboratory based experimental evolution.  

Laasya Samhita and Shraddha Karve are trying to bring together the (too) small community of researchers in India who work at the interface of molecular biology and evolution at Ashoka university in December this year. Updated: NEMO (New Ideas in Molecular Evolution) was much fun, and succeeded in getting together a bunch of (largely) early career biologists straddling

Hear Laasya bust three common myths about science and scientists – https://youtu.be/UFEJ8pxqCg4   (23/8/2022)

Usually, the genetic code is decoded in sets of three nucleotides starting with the start codon. Occasionally, the decoding ribosomes slip and change the ‘reading frame’. For some viruses, changing reading frames is a way of life. Read on to find out more about a particular study that I have covered in this clipboard: https://www.ias.ac.in/describe/article/jbsc/047/0049

  An old article of Laasya’s on the Handicap principle has been included in the special 75-year e-book of Resonance! Aimed at high school and college students.   https://www.ias.ac.in/Publications/e-Books/Resonance-75-vol1