Like many other life forms, bacteria too are prone to viral infections. Many bacteria harbor restriction endonuclease enzymes, which help check the infection by selectively cutting and destroying the viral genomic DNA. The perpetual tussle between bacteria and viruses to gain an upper hand has resul...

Bacteria are known to thrive in an incredibly wide variety of habitats and conditions ranging from the human gut to hot springs. Scientists are trying to understand how bacteria manage to learn to survive in various conditions and thus to learn about the process of evolution itself. For this, resear...

As a new means to harness light energy, Dr. Musthafa’s research group at IISER Pune has developed a battery that can produce power from a light source. This development could potentially allow solar energy to be stored directly in a battery along with paving way to generate a sustainable photo batte...

IISER Pune recently hosted an event on Texts, Tunes, Technologies: Perspectives on Indian Musics. The two-day event that included a talk, a half-day symposium, and a workshop, received a good response from the IISER Pune community as well as music aficionados from the city. The proceedings opened w...

A fundamental problem studied in Quantum Physics is the behavior of a quantum entity (e.g., electron) in various potentials. Quantum Physics assigns spatial probabilities to the electron at each instant of time. The question that T.S. Mahesh’s group at IISER Pune asked is can one retrieve these s...

[caption id="attachment_54" align="alignright" width="300"] Karan Kapoor and Shivprasad Patil with the instrument they have developed to measure rheological properties of fluids.[/caption] Imagine a small glass of water. Imagine the glass to be so small you cannot see it with your naked eyes—a gl...

Neurons or nerve cells are one of the longest cells in the body. They grow in rather precise directions and network with other neurons in order to transfer, integrate and process information. The molecular mechanisms and mechanics behind this defined directionality of neurons is an intriguing area o...

A new porous metal organic framework developed by Sujit Ghosh’s group transforms its structure and displays luminescence based on easily exchangeable anion molecules. This work has been published in a recent issue ofAngewandte Chemie. Metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) are porous materials and a...

[caption id="attachment_51" align="alignright" width="300"] Image shows a very large coronal mass ejection (CME) blasting off into space on December 2, 2002 (Image Source: SOHO (ESA & NASA))[/caption] Sun, the big bright star that supports life on Earth, can also influence the weather in interpla...

IISER Pune researchers address role of fluid dynamics in the mechanism by which nanostructures form, an often overlooked aspect in this area of research. Size becomes important, especially when you are talking about making ever smaller devices which could have applications in electronics, enginee...

Researchers at IISER Pune demonstrate that it is possible to propagate as well as localize light on a v-shaped silver nanowire, a phenomenon that could find application in designing plasmonic circuit elements and nano-optical detectors. Plasmonics is a branch of science dealing with interaction o...

Researchers from IISER Pune have designed and synthesized new compounds that can release sulphur dioxide and slow the growth of Mycobacterium tuberculosis, the pathogenic bacterium causing tuberculosis. This work, published in the Journal of Medicinal Chemistry (55:553-557), presents a new candidate...

Cells come in different shapes and sizes, literally! Bacterial cells, for example, could be round, rod or even spiral in shape. What determines specificity in cell shape and what functional advantages could a cell have in assuming a certain shape and size? This intriguing aspect of life as we know i...

A comprehensive study, the first of its kind in its in depth analysis, of CART (a neuropeptide with roles in appetite regulation) expression during different developmental stages of zebrafish has been recently reported by biologists at IISER Pune. A peptide that determines your appetite and a...

IISER Pune biologists have devised a simple system to count large number of small objects such as fruit flies (Drosophila) in the laboratory. This involves a set-up to scan anesthetized flies and a software, FlyCounter, to analyze the scanned image in order to count the flies. Experiments in ecol...

Srinivas Hotha leads a research group working on chemical glycosylation at IISER-Pune. Learn more about his research in this article. Srinivas Hotha obtained M.Sc. from the School of Chemistry at University of Hyderabad and a Ph.D. from Osmania University while working at the Indian Institute for...

Arijit Bhattacharyay is an Assistant Professor in Physics and Biology at IISER Pune. His research interests are in the area of statistical physics and his work involves complex systems that have multiple degrees of freedom and generally not in equilibrium. Resistive regime of a superconductor repres...

Scientists at IISER-Pune have synthesized a new fluorescent ribonucleoside analog, which can slip in as a native nucleoside during transcription and report changes in RNA conformation via changes in fluorescence properties. Results on synthesis and characterization of this uridine analog have bee...

Structure and function of biomolecules are closely linked. Knowledge of structure can help predict and understand function, and information on function can be tremendously useful to repair or modulate the system for a desired output. One approach to understand structure-function relationship is t...