Welcome to Bugbears.

We are a bunch of researchers at the National Centre for Biological Sciences, located in Bangalore, India. Our aim in life (at least at the workplace) is to figure out aspects of how the teeming zillions of teeny-weeny bacteria go about doing what they do.

 

LAB NEWS

 

Paper on genome-wide structural variations impacting xenogene silencing

In a paper, just published in Nucleic Acids Research, we use laboratory evolution and genome sequencing  to show that a large duplication of ~40% of the chromosome, centred around the origin or replication and comprising many highly expressed genes, can compensate for the global gene expression imbalance caused by a perturbation of gene silencing operating on horizont

Beefing up the manipulation of the immune system: a novel prophage in Indian Staphylococcus aureus

In a paper, just published in PLoS ONE, we report the presence of a novel prophage (viral DNA that is integrated in the host bacterial chromosome) in the genome of S. aureus from India (sequence type 772). This prophage carries two toxins, both of which are capable of manipulating the host immune system.