CCMB's COVID-19 Information Centre
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Check out CCMB's COVID-19 Information Centre - an one stop place to see our work in COVID-19 mitigation. If you are a researcher, startup, industry or a policymaker - you will benefit from seeing our diagnostic and surveillance techniques, and coronavirus cultures to develop therapeutics for fighting COVID-19. A citizen would also find many resources on what to do to fight the pandemic collectively.
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Genes that make South Asians more vulnerable to COVID-19? Not really
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A collaborative study between Gyaneshwar Chaubey, Benaras Hindu University and K Thangaraj at CCMB has refuted the claims of an earlier claim that a gene makes South Asians more vulnerable to COVID-19. They have made a case for conducting more population-specific genome studies that can find truer correlations of genetic mutations in a population and their COVID-19 outcomes. It is also important to remember that several other factors such as immunity and lifestyle that also determine COVID-19 susceptibility.
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Delta variant in Benaras; more coronavariants emerging
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We have found Delta variant of coronavirus along with at least seven other strains of the virus in Benaras in a collaborative study between Benaras Hindu University. These were done with samples collected in April 2021. While we now know that the Delta variant has spread across the country, and more other variants are emerging, all of us have a role to play in preventing the emergence of newer coronavirus variants.
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Complementing INSACOG to monitor coronavirus variants across India
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CCMB will lead a consortium of four city clusters - Hyderabad, Bangalore, Pune and New Delhi. This consortium will sequence genomes of coronavirus isolates from samples across India. This will complement INSACOG efforts and let us look at data with greater granularity.
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LaCONES-CCMB's guidelines for COVID-19 investigation in captive animals
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In light of multiple reports of COVID-19 incidents in zoos of India, LaCONES-CCMB with Central Zoo Authority and MoEFCC has released guidelines for zoo frontline. The guidelines include pictorials, protocols and FAQs on COVID-19 in animas and steps for samples collection from live and dead animals in zoos, and packaging to send to any of the four testing centres of animal samples in India. LaCONES-CCMB is one of the testing centres.
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Flexible receptors on cells? Computational biology helps to see them
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Receptors on cells surface bind to their corresponding ligands released by other cells. This forms the core of information transfer and communication among cells. How do the receptors bind to the ligands?
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In a collaborative study between Durba Sengupta at CSIR-National Chemical Laboratory and Amitabha Chattopadhyay, they have caught the CXCR1 receptor (in cyan in the panel) in the act with IL8, its ligand. In presence of the ligand, the receptor folds like a claw (picture on the right in the panel), and allows the ligand to slip into it.
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Reproductive behavior of animals; a tool to study climate change impact
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Musk deer and gorals are both herbivores, and share overlapping habitats in the Himalayas. The deer feeds on leaves, has a high quality diet for most part of the year. On the other hand, the goral feeds on grass, and its diet is much more affected by seasons.
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G Umapathy and Ajith Kumar's groups at LaCONES-CCMB and NCBS respectively have correlated this difference in the diet of animals with their reproductive behavior. The musk deer with high quality food throughout the year also does not show a strict seasonality in breeding, unlike the gorals.
Given these differences between the two animals occupying the same habitats, they form a good potential pair to study the impacts of climate change on a certain ecosystem.
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CCMB Biologue - for discussions on emerging life science questions
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CCMB Biologue celebrates its first anniversary. In the last one year, PhD students at CCMB initiated a talk series getting national and international experts in life sciences to discuss their work.
Join us for the anniversary special talk on Jul 15 with Amitabh Joshi from JNCASR, Bangalore. We will discuss the rush for elusive mechanisms in biology.
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This month we heard our alumnus, Ganesh Bagler from IIIT-Delhi. He spoke of his work on integrating data science in cooking. Can one day, computers be actually spewing out recipes? Or maybe even cook for us?
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Please send us your feedback at socialmedia[at]csirccmb[dot]org. Looking forward to them.
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