Journal of the Indian Institute of Science最新文献

Insect sociobiology is the research field that focusses on how and why some lineages of insects abandoned their solitary life styles to live in social groups. The simplest insect social groups are herds, groups of individuals that live together for a portion of their lives, sometimes cooperating with each other, and even helping to rear each other’s offspring. Figuring out the advantages and disadvantages of cooperation and group living is one of the primary research foci in insect sociobiology. Almost any student of animal behaviour or entomology has heard about eusocial insects, especially the best known eusocial insects, namely honeybees, ants, and termites that live in large colonies composed of one or a few queens and hundreds, thousands or even millions of workers. In eusocial societies, most eggs are laid by queens but the work of raising the brood that develop from those eggs, is done by workers. What many scientists and other enthusiasts of social insects do not realize, is that the original meaning of the term eusocial was different and that it was coined by a pioneering entomologist, Dr. Suzanne Batra, almost 60 years ago. Batra’s contributions to sociobiology were often overlooked, as happened to many women scientists of the time, but in recent years, her contributions to sociobiology have achieved increased and long overdue recognition.

Prebiotic chemical evolution that led to the emergence of life on primitive Earth is interlinked with the delivery of organic material through the impact of comets, asteroids and meteorites. The catastrophic nature of impact leads to significant damage to planetary bodies. The high pressure and temperature can cause molecules to break apart and they may not survive in such extreme conditions. Also, impact-induced shock can cause impacted molecules to undergo vibration, dissociation, deformation, depending on their chemical properties and thus can offer enormous potential for the synthesis of building blocks of life. Novel experimental and theoretical approaches are required to simulate the phenomena that occur during impacts. In this brief review, we discuss impacts and related processes through laboratory experiments and simulations that study the impact-shock chemistry and its role in the Origins of Life.

Obesity and its associated metabolic derangements have become a major global health challenge. Ectopic fat accumulation disrupts metabolic homeostasis leading to metabolic syndrome (MetS), type 2 diabetes (T2D), and cardiovascular diseases. T2D is strongly associated with chronic low-grade inflammation in the adipose tissue, liver, and arguably in the skeletal muscle. Secretory proteins elaborated by these organs, i.e., adipokines, hepatokines, and myokines, are collectively grouped as organokines, which interact with each other to produce complex effects in insulin target tissues through endocrine, autocrine, and paracrine pathways. Since organokines have both proinflammatory and anti-inflammatory effects, the optimum balance between them is critical for metabolic homeostasis. The goal of this review is to focus on the functions of some of these organokines that have been identified in contemporary research as major regulators of inflammation, leading to the onset and progression of metabolic diseases.

The Integrated Microbial Genomes and Microbiomes (IMG/M) system is a web-based platform that provides access to the wealth of public sequence data arising from diverse environments and enables the user to answer biological questions. In this review, we explore IMG’s tools and features using genome data for genus Deinococcus isolates as well as metagenome-assembled genomes (MAGs). We use various comparative genomic and visualization tools to investigate this genus and address specific research questions.

Diabetic foot complications remain one of the most common and neglected complications of diabetes. With the increase in incidence of diabetes across South East Asia; especially India, we are staring at a problem which promises to blow up into a massive public health crisis unless all the stakeholders including the Government of India wakes up and takes the necessary initiatives to prepare the Health system to tackle the upcoming “TSUNAMI” of diabetic foot. The below article highlights the magnitude of problem that India faces along with the different ways in which it can be handled. It also talks about the different aspects of diabetic foot and the recent updates and the technology available in India. Even with the surge in technology and improving healthcare system; proper diabetic foot care still remains one of the most difficult services to obtain even in metropolitan cities across India.

Carbon because of its electronic structure can formulate several types of bonds and allotropes. In the ranking of elements in the Universe, carbon is the fourth most abundant after H, He and O. To date, carbon signatures have been detected in different parts of the interstellar medium (ISM), circumstellar medium (CSM) and in our solar system. It is now evident that in the ISM, carbon is present in the form of gas, ice and dust phases. Almost a decade ago, astronomers were able to trace the signature of the largest carbonaceous molecule, fullerene in different parts of the ISM, including planetary nebula (PNe), reflection nebula, and in ionised hydrogen (HII) regions. This has led the growing international astrochemistry community to revisit the formation pathways of different carbon nanostructures under simulated interstellar conditions. The aim of this article is to review and summarise all the experiments relevant to the formation of interstellar carbonaceous dust performed by various groups across the globe.

Apiculture, in conjunction with agriculture, offers great scope for income generation through beekeeping. Pollinators provide pollination services that are crucial for enhancing crop productivity and sustaining ecosystem services. Honeybees are the important pollinators of various fruits, vegetables, oilseeds, pulses and fibre crops. In order to achieve sufficient pollination to improve productivity of crops, beekeeping industry needs encouragement. In addition to providing valuable products like honey, beeswax, nectar, pollen, propolis, royal jelly and other products, beekeeping helps to provide additional source of income and employment generation to rural masses. As per estimates only 10% of the existing potential for beekeeping has been utilized in the country and there is much untapped potential. India has a potential of over 200 million bee colonies as against 3.4 million colonies at present which can provide employment to over 6 million rural families. Organised honey collection using modern techniques can provide additional 120,000 tons of honey and 10,000 tons of beeswax from the forests. This can provide employment to 5 million tribal families. Increasing honeybee colonies shall not only increase production of bee products but aso will ensure sustainability of food production through enhanced agricultural and horticultural crop production. Beekeeping industry and its expansion faces several challenges which need to be addressed to make this industry more profitable.

The DOE Joint Genome Institute has developed and maintains a number of computational resources and databases to help biologists perform -omics-based scientific research. In this review, we describe two of its widely used microbiome data management and analysis resources: the Genome OnLine Database (GOLD) and the Integrated Microbial Genomes (IMG). GOLD is a sequencing project and associated metadata management system. It provides a catalog of genome and metagenome projects with well-curated associated metadata which are critical for sequence data interpretation. IMG is an omics data management system enabling the comparative analysis of microbial genomes, metagenomes, and metatranscriptomics and their associated genes and functions. IMG contains close to 200,000 datasets and provides advanced search and comparative analysis tools. GOLD’s metadata are integrated into IMG to provide a better understanding of the environments and properties of each dataset. In addition to all the public data integrated, both systems support private user data submission and integration to support annotation and comparative analysis with all other data integrated into the systems. There are currently over 25,000 registered users from more than 110 countries, and the systems are also used for educational purposes across various universities around the world.

Bacteriophages are ubiquitous, from natural environments to human-made shelters. Their prevalence is governed mainly by their host bacteria, leading to their coevolution with bacterial populations. Phages can contribute to the exchange of genetic information in various microbial communities and have a significant impact on how such communities might impact the humans around them. Phages are specific to their host and therefore have been chosen as the ideal candidates for the design of therapeutics to combat pathogenic bacteria as an alternative to antibiotics. Certain properties of phages have found tremendous applications in the biotechnology and healthcare sector. Although phage research is at a nascent stage, especially with regard to the phage diversity in microbiomes and their impact on humans. Microbiome research is progressing rapidly with the advent of multi-omics technologies and pipelines, but more phage-oriented studies are needed to better understand their role in microbiomes. This review compiles previous phage-associated studies in diverse environments, techniques used, knowledge gaps that need to be addressed, and how this information translates to help develop and maintain built environments like the International Space Station.