Honeybees to Drones! Interview with Mark Roper on visual detectors for navigation!!

You must have all experienced a honeybee buzz around you, avoiding all your attempts at hitting it. These tiny animals are amazing at navigation. They move around like superman finding little flowers with ease. What makes them so good at navigation?

Mark and colleagues wanted to understand the amazing navigation capabilities of honeybees and generate a model of it. One would imagine that the system would be highly complex, with tons of interactions. But they show that the system can not only be modeled on a very few components, but it has a simplistic architecture. This generates a small and efficient system, which can be useful for helping us generate better navigation algorithm for daily life. As an instance, drones require large amounts of battery power for flying, which restricts the distance they can travel. But using honeybees based navigation system can allow them to be lighter and less power consuming, allowing them to fly much longer distances. Please listen to Mark to know more.



To know more, please refer to:
Insect Bio-inspired Neural Network Provides New Evidence on How Simple Feature Detectors Can Enable Complex Visual Generalization and Stimulus Location Invariance in the Miniature Brain of Honeybees
Roper et al., PLoS Computational Biology, 2017

Mind reading! Interview on Brain-computer interface for the completely locked-in by Ujwal Chaudhary.

Stephen Hawkins uses a special computer technology which translates the movements of his cheek muscles to communicate with the outside world. His inability to move any other muscle is due to loss of muscular function from ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis) disease. Unfortunately, some patients with ALS do not even retain a single musclular function, while retaining all mental functions; a state called locked-in syndrome. It would be great to help such people with a technology that could directly read the thoughts of the unfortunate patient.

With this inspiration, Ujwal and colleagues developed a brain-computer interface capable of reading simple 'yes' or 'no' thoughts of completely locked-in individuals. The interface is completely non-invasive and can be trained to read thoughts to any question. With this they can increase the interactions with the patients, stimulating and enriching their time, and increasing contact with the outside world.

This generates a nucleus that can be expanded to read full sentences, a technology out of sci-fi, but surely of great use to the unfortunately paralyzed. Please listen to Ujwal on this amazing technology.


To know further on the research, please read:
Brain–Computer Interface–Based Communication in the Completely Locked-In State.
Chaudhary et al., PLoS Biology, 2017

A morphing traveler. Interview with Mohit Jolly on identity changes during metastasis!

Cancer cells evade foreign tissues during metastasis. This process is most critical phase of cancer development, since it decreases a successful prognostics drastically. During the invasion process, the cells change their characteristics, acquiring different shapes, cell identity and lineage. How this is regulated still remains open question, and vital to developing a cure for the disease.

Mohit and colleagues take an integrated theoretical-experimental approach to understand how sarcomas spread. Sacromas arise from connective tissues, like bone or fat. And while traveling long distances they undergo a change into more epithelial like identity. This plasticity helps the cells survive better in the the body. To more more about such transition, please listen to the interview with Mohit.



For more information, please refer to:
Mesenchymal-epithelial transition in sarcomas is controlled by the combinatorial expression of miR-200s and GRHL2
Somarelli et al., Molecular and Cellular Biology, 2016

One ratio to rule them all! Interview with Leigh Harris about a unified principle regulating bacterial cell size!

We live in a 3D world, in which every object occupies space. Same is true for all cells. The size of biological objects is a ubiquitous property, about which very less is known. How do cells 'measure' their size and how do they regulate it in response to changing environment? These unanswered questions have far-reaching implications on every aspect of biology.

Leigh Harris and her colleagues set out to discover the principles regulating cell size in a simple model, bacteria. She used live imaging and quantitative analysis to accurate measure bacterial cell volume and surface area: two parameters implicated in size control. Excitingly, she was able to come up with a simple ratio: the rate of surface area to volume change, which defines the steady state size and shape of the cell. This presents a novel unified model for regulating bacterial size. Lets call Leigh to understand more about this principle!



To know about the story, please read:
Relative Rates of Surface and Volume Synthesis Set Bacterial Cell Size
Leigh and Theriot, Cell, 2 June 2016.

Cheaters Make Co-operation Robust!

Which of these is true??

1. You need rational beings with minds to have teamwork.
2. Bacteria and yeast, organisms without brain, cannot collaborate for the good of each other.
3. Cheating individuals destroy co-operation in the society, and crash its existence.

If you thought that all were false, you might be in for a surprise!

We do have limited resources in this world. And for our survival, correct utilization of those resources based is of utmost importance. Many people can co-operate peacefully with each other to manage resource use. 

But what happens when a few people start to cheat, and greedily take more than their fair share without contributing to the general good. One would think this would cause havoc and destroy the delicate balance of co-operation among individuals, finally leading to population crash. 

Unexpectedly, Adam Waite in his work performed at University of Washington found otherwise. He simulated population dynamics between co-operative and cheating individuals sharing limited resources, and excitingly found that the population became more robust to crashes. 

To understand this exciting and interesting finding, lets call him up!

To know more about the work, please read the article:
Defectors Can Create Conditions That Rescue Cooperation
Waite et al., PLOS Computational Biology 11(12): e1004645, December, 2015.

and the blog:
Cheaters allow cooperators to prosper