Organ mimics are helping decode complex diseases On the lab bench, inside a Petri dish nestled between two metal coils, sits an unassuming glob of jelly. But this is no ordinary jelly – it is a squishy gel filled with magnetic particles and cells from the human lung. Once the power switches on, magnetic […]
Demystifying nature’s oldest pigment producers In Shantanu Shukla’s lab, dissecting insects is routine. The well-lit room, located in the Department of Developmental Biology and Genetics (DBG), IISc, is filled with young scientists studying scale insects – tiny plant vampires that feed on the plant phloem sap. The team investigates the intimate relationship between insects […]
Creating under constraint When Umesh Varshney joined IISc as an Assistant Professor, he was excited to dive straight into microbiology research. It was 1991, and he had just returned from his postdoctoral stint at MIT in Cambridge. He planned to study protein synthesis in Escherichia coli and DNA repair in mycobacteria, among other exciting […]
The case of the missing radioactive stones As the last flowers cling to their trees, and the spring blossoms begin to fade on campus, the onset of summer is marked by a very special time at IISc: the arrival of Open Day. Gates open, labs light up, and thousands of people throng the campus, […]
Chasing climate clues in underwater fossils Around 18,000 years ago, the Earth began to thaw. Expansive ice sheets that had covered much of the northern hemisphere for tens of thousands of years began to retreat. Sea levels rose, glaciers collapsed, and the planet slowly emerged from the last ice age. At the same time, […]
How electron spins can boost computing You wake up late. Your assignment is due in two minutes. You grab your laptop with a standard 8 or 16 GB RAM, a 512 solid state drive (SSD) that is “supposed” to be fast, a decent processor that usually gets the job done. You press the power […]
On research, failure and learning to work with the mess The experiment, at least on paper, was simple: watch what happens to the physical forces between cells as a healthy tissue starts becoming cancerous. Push, pull, tension mapped onto something as messy as a living tissue. I remember feeling all tingly when I came […]
There’s more than meets the eye when it comes to ‘junk’ DNA In September 2012, as the final papers from the ENCODE (ENCyclopedia Of DNA Elements) project rolled out, the mood among many molecular biologists was triumphant. After more than a decade of coordinated experiments across dozens of laboratories, the consortium made a bold […]
Is it dead? Is it alive? Surely it has to be either, right? Consider a cat in a box – let’s call him Meownstein. Along with him inside the box, there is a radioactive sample (which can decay to produce radiation) and a poison vial with a radiation sensor. If the sample decays, the […]
What microbes are teaching us about life in space In Andy Weir’s fiction novel The Martian, NASA astronaut Mark Watney is stranded alone on Mars after his crew is forced to evacuate. To survive, he begins growing potatoes in his crew’s Martian habitat. Soon, however, he develops a new priority – ensuring the survival […]
