When a coronary artery closes silently, cutting off the oxygen supply to an entire region of the heart, the body has only minutes to respond. Cells begin to die. Tissues starve. Yet, for reasons scientists still struggle to explain, two people with nearly identical injuries can have vastly different futures. One recovers quickly; the other carries the damage for life.

Part of the answer lies in a network of blood vessels known as collateral arteries. These vascular channels can reroute blood around a blockage, restoring oxygen to injured tissue. Some people are born with abundant collateral networks. Others have very few. Under certain conditions, however, the body can even build new ones.

My idea of an artery was embarrassingly simple: a hollow tube in an anatomy textbook, fully developed during the early years of life. Turns out, an artery knows the trick to unmake itself when it is pinched shut. Its walls loosen into individual cells that gather again and stitch together new back up vessels. Few scientists have spent as much time unravelling this mystery as Soumyashree Das.

At her laboratory at the National Centre for Biological Sciences (NCBS-TIFR), Bengaluru, Das studies how blood vessels develop, regenerate and respond to injury. Her work sits at the intersection of developmental biology and medicine, drawing together genetics, microscopy and surgical techniques to answer one simple question: How do arteries rebuild themselves?

The question is much newer than the instinct behind it.

Das grew up in Cuttack, Odisha, in a household where science was less a profession than an atmosphere. Her father taught chemistry at a university; her mother worked in finance. 

It was the little things like dinner table conversations. I remember my father bringing chemistry models home and teaching me and my sister. When you encounter science in bits and pieces every day, as part of your daily life, it inspires you - not in a cinematic way where you suddenly realise it. For me, it happened gradually. It was a series of baby steps.” 

Das told me.

Those steps did not initially lead toward biology. In school, Das considered herself stronger in physics and chemistry. But it was biology that captured her attention. She was fascinated by the body, especially by how organs functioned, how different tissues worked together and how something as intricate as a human being emerged from a collection of cells. It began as a simple curiosity, the kind that sends you flipping through diagrams of the heart or wondering what happens beneath the skin.

By the time she began her PhD at Rutgers University,New Jersey, in the laboratory of Nan Gao, those questions had turned into a fascination with cell fate. She studied how stem cells in the intestine decide whether to remain stem cells or become something else entirely. This decision is regulated in part by Wnt, a signalling pathway that plays a central role in the development and regeneration of many tissues. Das traced the stem cells' fate to Wnt secretion and to the function of a vesicle transport protein called Rab8a, which physically carries the signal out of the cells producing it. When Rab8a is absent, Wnt secretion is disrupted, compromising the maintenance of the stem cell population. 

She didn't move into vasculature for any grand reason. A postdoctoral position at Stanford, in the laboratory of Kristy Red-Horse, "just seemed like a great field to be in," as she has put it. Red-Horse was supportive, but the question that had driven Das since her PhD—‘what makes a cell choose one identity over another?’ remained the same. Only the biological system had changed.

The first year at Stanford nearly ended things before they began. Postdoctoral research is often demanding, but for Das, the experience felt particularly difficult. “Postdocs are tough because you want to do something amazing, and there is this peer pressure also because in a place like Stanford, you really need to stand out,” she said. "I almost quit after my first year. I was not getting anywhere, and I thought maybe academia was not for me." 

Red-Horse talked her down. Das recalled that conversation: 

My supervisor told me, ‘Nothing happens in a year, at least not in biology. You have to give yourself at least a couple of years to see whether you can get anywhere.’ And one thing that she said that has stayed with me, and I still tell my lab is that you have to learn to enjoy your day-to-day life. You can't be miserable on a daily basis and hope that you are going to make an amazing discovery in the next year or ten years.” 

The part of the work that demanded Das's attention was confocal imaging. She attached tiny fluorescent tags to cells, and every day, she watched what the naked eye never could. Arteries glowing like tree branches filled with fireflies, and coloured cells that looked like constellations. The question she was trying to answer had been lingering in the minds of biologists for years: why do some heart-attack patients survive better and recover faster than others? Red-Horse and her team suspected that the answer lay in collateral arteries. Mice were the best model because they offered one inconsistency that was useful. Newborn mice can build a working collateral artery within four to six days of an injury, but older mice mostly cannot. That gap between what a young body can do and what an ageing body can no longer do became the engine of the whole research. 

Das fluorescent labelled the coronary arteries in a set of mice. To simulate a heart attack, she tied off a coronary artery and blocked the blood flow. The surgical procedure was led by cardiothoracic surgeon Andrew Goldstone, who was then a medical resident at Stanford. She returned every six, twelve, and twenty-four hours to image what the labelled tissue was doing. Individual cells broke loose from the walls of the injured artery and migrated outward into the surrounding tissue. There they began to divide and then organised themselves into a new functional vessel - a bridge connecting the wounded artery to a neighbouring healthy artery. The process came to be known as Artery Reassembly.

Collateral arteries are not a new discovery. As early as the 2nd century AD, the Greek physician Antyllus had noticed that major blood vessels in the limbs could be tied off without killing the tissue beyond them. Das traces the next chapter of the story to the 17th century, when the English physician and anatomist Richard Lower injected dye into the coronary arteries of a human heart after death and watched it flow into the territory of another vessel. Centuries later, studies showed that patients with collateral arteries recover better from strokes and heart attacks than those without them. But were these hidden detours already there as emergency lifeboats, or could the body build new ones after blood flow was cut off? Das's postdoctoral research went further than almost anyone before her in answering that question. It didn't just show that collateral arteries could form after a blockage. It captured, cell by cell, the moment an artery began forming a collateral artery after a heart attack. 

Das joined NCBS, Bengaluru, as an assistant professor in 2020, stepping into the unfamiliar role of principal investigator. Her lab now runs two parallel investigations into collateral formation, one in the heart and the other in the brain. In the heart, as her postdoctoral work showed, collaterals appear during development and in response to artery blockage. In the brain, her lab has found that the tips of two separate arteries simply grow toward each other and form collaterals during normal embryonic development. A trail of cells coming from blood capillaries seems to guide the two artery tips to one another. One receptor, VegfR2, seems to matter in both organs. Another receptor called Cxcr4 is essential only for the heart's version of the process.  In 2024, Das’ work won the Werner Risau Early Career Investigator Award in Vascular Biology, named for one of the field's founding figures. The award recognised her discovery that arterial cells, long thought to be terminally differentiated, can re-enter the cell cycle and de-differentiate, reverting to a more potent cellular state.

Das's working hypothesis has to do with how differently those organs tolerate a shortage of oxygen. Neurons have far less patience for it than heart muscles, which may be the reason the brain forms its emergency detours in advance rather than waiting until injury strikes. The number of collateral arteries in the brain isn't fixed for life. It declines with age. This could be why older people are more vulnerable to strokes. 

Here is where the Wnt signalling pathway makes an unexpected reappearance. Her lab had already identified a specific Wnt ligand, WNT2, as a key regulator of collateral artery growth in the heart. The obvious next question was whether variations in this same pathway might explain why some patients recover much more poorly than others after a heart attack. In collaboration with Perundurai Subramaniam Dhandapany, faculty at Institute for Stem Cell Science and Regenerative Medicine (BRIC-inStem), Das's lab compared the exomes (the protein-coding parts of the genome) of Indian patients with cardiovascular disease with those of healthy controls, focusing specifically on genes within the WNT signalling pathway. They found multiple genetic mutations with the potential to influence collateral artery development. The lab is now working to understand how each of these mutations affects cellular function and vascular regeneration. 

Das is already thinking beyond the laboratory and towards what these discoveries could mean for patients, long before a heart attack occurs. "If you know at an early stage that you have this critical mutation," she says, "you will be careful about your diet and other lifestyle choices." Her next goal, and perhaps her most ambitious, is to develop a predictive mathematical model that could use a person's genetic profile and estimate, in advance, the kind of collateral response their body can build or support.

None of the achievements in Das’s laboratory happened under ideal conditions. Das joined NCBS in the middle of India's second wave of COVID-19, tasked with establishing a wet laboratory thousands of kilometres away from the mentor and mouse colony she'd spent years building at Stanford. She shipped her mouse lines to Bengaluru, then spent two anxious weeks tracking a shipment that repeatedly stalled in transit, ensuring the animals were fed and watered at every delay. Almost as disorienting, in its own way, was the bureaucracy. As a graduate student and postdoc abroad, she had been shielded from the administrative side of running a lab by her own supervisors and their dedicated staff. Back in India, she found herself planning months in advance just to order a single reagent, routed through layers of approval that, she says, would have taken days rather than months anywhere else she had worked. When she started her own lab, she had imagined remaining a hands-on experimental biologist, doing experiments herself, teaching the delicate ligation surgeries personally, sitting down to analyse her own imaging data. Instead, she discovered that leading a laboratory required an entirely different set of responsibilities. Between writing grants, recruiting students and research scholars, and managing administrative paperwork, the job of a principal investigator turned out to be something very different from the one she had anticipated.

Das hopes some of that support will come through the EMBO Global Investigator Network, which she joined only recently and is still learning to navigate. The network’s training sessions have already caught her attention. Next year, more than six years after starting her own lab, she will attend her first workshop on leadership and student recruitment.

For Das, curiosity should always lead science. Where the system falls short, in her view, is not in the students, but in the support structures surrounding research. “Our students are as good as any other place. I have seen this first-hand after working in two different countries and having friends who have worked across the globe,”says Das. Postdoctoral researchers are often told, almost as an article of faith, that a stretch abroad is absolutely required before returning to India to lead a laboratory, advice she has heard repeatedly without anyone clearly articulating why. As a PI, she argues that funding is only part of the challenge. Scientists need institutional support just as urgently - people who can handle travel requests, purchase orders, and the administrative work that quietly accumulates around research. While institutions like NCBS have some of these support systems in place, Das points out that access to such support remains uneven across the country. In many of the laboratories where she trained abroad, those tasks belonged to dedicated administrative staff, who supported either one PI or a small group of two or three PIs. In India, they tend to find their way back to the scientist's desk.

NCBS has the freedom to pursue the questions that interest me and the opportunity to work with extraordinary students. Being part of this research community in Bengaluru also makes collaborations easier, with researchers often finding opportunities to work together across disciplines,” 

says Das, reflecting on her time at the institute.

Das arrived at the heart by chance. Years earlier, she had set out to understand a fundamental question in biology: how cells decide what they will become. Somewhere along the way, that question led her to collateral arteries, and to a phenomenon that seemed to defy the tidy diagrams of an anatomy textbook. A cell that has spent years as part of an artery can become something else entirely as a last attempt to bargain with death. There is something reassuring about that. That even in an organ starved of blood, some cells find new roads to life.

In the quiet corridors of molecular biology, a long-standing "golden rule" has guided researchers for decades: if a gene is conserved across species, it performs the same function, whether in a mouse or a human. While this principle has long justified our reliance on animal models, modern genomics has revealed a far more nuanced reality. Deep sequence conservation does not always translate into identical functional roles, leaving room for striking exceptions.

For Bhavana Muralidharan, Principal Investigator at the BRIC-Institute for Stem Cell Science and Regenerative Medicine (BRIC-inStem) in Bengaluru, this biological dogma was not a boundary; it was an invitation to look closer. While her laboratory was investigating a specific gene of interest, they stumbled upon a discovery that challenged a fundamental assumption of evolutionary biology: the gene was not behaving according to the established rules. 

At the molecular level, the protein encoded by this conserved gene behaves exactly as expected, removing epigenetic modifications from the DNA whether isolated from a mouse or a human. Yet, when her team looked at how this identical protein operates in a living tissue context, they discovered that the human brain follows an entirely different, brilliantly complex script. 

In simpler terms, if the protein is the software of a computer, the human brain has developed its own unique hardware to run it. This hardware consists of specific molecular "switches", known as enhancers, which are different in humans and mice. Enhancers act like volume knobs, turning certain genes on, off, or fine-tuning their activity. By leveraging unique enhancers and human-enriched targets, the human brain assembles a cellular machine far more sophisticated than any animal model could predict.

This paradox challenges the very way biologists predict gene function from sequence data. In the lab, a protein might show identical binding affinity and structure across species, leading researchers to assume its biological role is fixed. But as Bhavana points out, looking at a protein in isolation only tells half the story.

You look at a conserved gene and think that it will have a conserved function," she reflects, "and then you find that the protein biochemistry is conserved but ultimately the protein function and phenotype is not."

This single revelation didn't just alter a project; it illuminated a new path into the "black box"- the intricate, mysterious machinery of the human brain. It reveals that our unique cognitive abilities do not necessarily require entirely new genetic building blocks. Instead, evolution has modified how existing conserved genes are regulated and deployed. Such changes in genomic wiring may ultimately underlie the complexity that distinguishes the human brain from the rest of the animal kingdom.

The accidental architect: An organic evolution

Bhavana's journey into this microscopic frontier began not with a grand, rigid plan but through a series of unexpected detours. Like many high school students navigating India’s fiercely competitive academic landscape, her initial aim was firmly set on medicine. When the gruelling entrance exams did not yield a seat on her first attempt, she pivoted to a BTech programme in Biotechnology..

It was a redirection she now describes as an "organic evolution," fueled by the right mentors appearing at just the right moments. The definitive spark came from her Head of Department, Krishnamoorthy Kannan, a teacher who famously bypassed stagnant textbooks and placed research papers directly into his students' hands.

In those pages, the concepts of stem cells, developmental biology, and organiser functions came alive. Science, to her, transformed from a static list of memorised facts into a living, breathing detective story. "That's when I understood research, how people even do research," she recalls. For her, it was a major turning point that made her realise that a PhD was perhaps what she wanted to pursue next.

Playing the long game: The 5-year strategy

As she progressed through her academic journey, Bhavana became highly trained in the intricate world of RNA biology. Yet, during her PhD, she sensed a shifting tide. For decades, fields such as chromatin biology and RNA biology had been at the forefront of biological discovery. Over time, however, these fields became increasingly saturated, leaving a crowded landscape where research often centered on incremental answers to well-worn questions. Recognising this shift, Bhavana chose a different path. Rather than retracing familiar steps in a crowded arena, she decided to apply her expertise in genetic regulation to a far less explored frontier: human neurodevelopment.

Drawing on a forward-thinking philosophy that she now instils in her own graduate students, she chose to play the long game. She realised that while science had uncovered an immense amount of mechanisms within the mouse brain, the molecular inner workings of the human brain remained a vastly unexplored territory.

Her transition crystallised during a Journal Club meeting that seamlessly bridged RNA biology and neurobiology, focusing on the local translation of a protein at the synapse. In that moment, she recognised that the molecular tools and perspectives she had developed in RNA biology could be applied to some of neuroscience’s most compelling questions.

Bhavana advises researchers against simply chasing whatever field happens to be popular or in high demand today, as that rarely leaves room for fully transformative contributions. Instead, she emphasises the importance of looking ahead:

You should think of what's gonna happen in the next 5 years, which area is gonna need more people."
 

By thinking far ahead, she strategically positioned her research at the intersection of neurodevelopment and molecular biology, bringing a unique perspective to an emerging field. Her trajectory demonstrates that the most meaningful scientific contributions often come not from following established trends, but from identifying unanswered questions and venturing into unexplored territory.

Learning from dysfunction

Today, her research group tackles some of the most complex aspects of neurological development: autism, intellectual disability, and neuropsychiatric disorders like schizophrenia. While society often views these disorders through a lens of tragic finality, Bhavana sees them as powerful windows into understanding how the brain works.

She operates on a core scientific conviction that bridges fundamental bench science with translation: "Dysfunction can also teach you a lot about function". By mapping the exact moments where the brain’s molecular wiring goes off-script, her team uncovers the fundamental, hidden rules that keep a healthy mind on track.

This meticulous approach is born from therapeutic necessity. Historically, because the human brain has been treated as a biological "black box," clinicians have relied on broad treatments without fully understanding the molecular pathways involved. For example, drugs such as lithium have long been used to treat bipolar disorder despite incomplete knowledge of their precise mechanisms of action.

To move towards a future of truly personalised medicine, Muralidharan argues that understanding disease requires dissecting its molecular underpinnings, because, as she puts it, "the devil is in the details". Today, her lab sits at the intersection of precision medicine, mental health, and non-animal model (NAM) systems. 

Specifically, her lab focuses on chromatinopathies—disorders arising from the dysregulation of chromatin architecture and function. Chromatin acts as the master controller of our genetic instruction manual, controlling which genes are turned on or off during development. When this packaging system fails, it fundamentally alters early neurodevelopment, setting the stage for lifelong conditions such as autism and intellectual disability. 

To study human brain development without relying purely on animal models, her team employs advanced human stem-cell-based systems that recreate key features of brain development in the laboratory. They achieve this by taking patient-derived induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) and cultivating them into three-dimensional cerebral organoids and assembloids. These miniature, tissue-like cultures allow the lab to study the actual molecular mechanisms of psychiatric disorders directly in human cells, providing insights that would be difficult to obtain from animal models alone.

The true cost of discovery: Facing ecosystem hurdles

While her laboratory at BRIC-inStem has gained momentum and is making significant strides toward solving critical questions in neurodevelopment, the pursuit of these high-impact discoveries comes with a demanding and grounded reality. Translating an ambitious scientific vision into daily laboratory operations requires navigating an immediate set of systemic and structural challenges. While conceptualising bold research questions demands foresight, sustaining a productive research programme requires overcoming the everyday constraints of the scientific ecosystem.

Beyond the structural hurdles of funding and infrastructure, the daily reality of running a lab often demands a pivot in roles that many principal investigators find difficult to navigate. "I am being more and more drawn towards admin work and the scientist in me is finding less and less time," she notes candidly. Describing herself as a "novice administrator," she openly acknowledges the delicate act of balancing institutional paperwork with scientific mentorship.

Yet, her most fierce advocacy is reserved for the structural health of the Indian scientific ecosystem itself, particularly the issue of fellowship support for students and early-career researchers. She stands firmly against the outdated notion that a passion for science justifies financial hardship.

This concern for the research environment directly shapes her perspective on the financial realities facing early-career scientists. "The amount of fellowship is too little for the kind of work you're doing, which is intellectually and physically demanding," she argues.

For Bhavana, supporting the next generation of scientists requires more than providing research opportunities, it also means ensuring that talented students can pursue science without being burdened by financial uncertainty. In her view, a healthy scientific ecosystem depends not only on cutting-edge research and infrastructure but also on investing in the people who drive discovery forward.

Mentorship, collaboration, and the global stage

Bhavana’s trajectory is a tapestry of lessons gathered from her own mentors, which she carefully curates for her students. From her very first college professor, she learned how to deeply dissect a research paper - teaching her students to ignore the written results section initially, look directly at the raw figures, and draw their own unbiased conclusions. From her PhD advisor, she inherited a structured approach to scientific reasoning and hypothesis formulation. From her postdoctoral mentor, Shubha Tole, she learned tenacity, hard work, and the absolute necessity of rigorous future planning.

Beyond mastering experimental design, navigating the unique rhythm of Indian procurement requires a distinct kind of operational foresight."Especially in India, planning ahead of time helps because things take time," she remarks, noting the logistical lag of importing laboratory reagents.

This blend of meticulous planning and bold science has earned her significant international recognition, notably the prestigious EMBO Global Investigator Award. Beyond the immediate institutional limelight, the award acts as a massive catalyst for her entire lab group. It provides critical funding to take her students to global conferences, provides specialised lab leadership courses, and plugs her team directly into an elite network of investigators across India and Europe. The recognition, as she notes, has "definitely upped the science by a notch."

Expanding horizons: What it means to be a scientist

Looking at the rapidly changing landscape shaped by artificial intelligence and big data, Bhavana challenges early-career researchers to expand their definitions of success. The old, rigid academic pipeline- PhD to postdoc to PI is no longer the only honourable path.

"The fact that you don't have to be at the bench for research is very good," she emphasises, pointing toward expanding, vital roles in science policy, science communication, patent law, regulatory affairs, data science, and a thriving industrial research sector.

Drawing from her experience in the UK, she highlights a philosophy of total inclusivity across the scientific workforce:

Anybody who's at the bench, in the lab, or in the field is a scientist. You're not just a scientist because you became a PI. You're a technician, you're a scientist; you're a PhD scholar, you're a scientist..."

Whether her lab members are navigating complex datasets, engineering human cerebral organoids, or communicating basic brain perception to the public, Muralidharan views science as a deeply collaborative, collective effort. By decoding the human brain's silent molecular drama, her work serves as a powerful reminder that understanding the mind is not just about correcting what goes wrong. It is about uncovering the fundamental principles that govern how the brain develops, adapts, and functions. In doing so, her research demonstrates that some of the most profound insights emerge precisely where familiar biological rules begin to break down.

In a high-tech lab in Bengaluru, the future of medicine isn't being found in a synthetic compound or a sterile petri dish. Instead, it’s sitting inside a hundred year old jar, the ceramic gone the color of weak tea, and it has never once been washed clean. It has traveled from a kitchen in Madurai to a laboratory in Bengaluru, passed hand to hand through four generations of the same family, each of them feeding it the same way their mothers did: a little rice, a little urad dal, water, warmth, and much patience. What's inside the jar is idli batter or it will be, in a few hours, once the fermentation does its quiet work. But to the scientists who have started studying jars like this one, what's inside is something more than just fermented food. A hundred years of continuous microbial life, shaped by nothing more than one family's hands and one region's air, still humming along exactly as it did before India had refrigerators, before it had antibiotics, before it had the word "probiotic."

That jar is the reason this story exists. And it's also, unfortunately, becoming a kind of elegy.

When researchers ran the starter culture through modern metagenomic sequencing, the technique that reads the genetic material of an entire microbial community at once, rather than trying to grow and identify each organism one at a time, they found what they expected: familiar genera like Lactobacillus and Saccharomyces, the workhorse organisms of fermentation everywhere. But a portion of the genetic material simply didn't match anything in the reference databases scientists use to identify microbial life. It was not contamination or a sequencing error but rather organisms, and possibly whole functional pathways, that haven't been catalogued.

Researchers have started calling this the "dark microbiome," borrowing the metaphor from dark matter: something whose presence is unmistakable even though its nature isn't yet mapped. The open questions are the interesting part. Are these previously undocumented species, or known species carrying genes nobody has annotated yet? Do they produce metabolites: the small molecules that gut bacteria use to communicate to the immune system, regulate inflammation, or break down fiber the human body can't digest on its own, that aren't found in the commercial probiotic strains sold in pharmacies? Nobody can say yet with certainty. That uncertainty is precisely why a hundred-year-old jar of idli batter has become a research subject instead of just food for breakfast.

This discovery matters beyond scientific curiosity as this jar, and thousands like it sitting in kitchens across the country, may hold the last intact record of a gut ecosystem that the rest of India is actively losing.

A mapping study by BRIC-National Centre for Cell Science (NCCS), set out to compare the gut microbiomes of urban and rural Indian populations, and what it found reads more like a warning. As diets shift away from high-fiber, minimally processed regional food toward packaged and processed alternatives, microbial diversity in the gut is falling. It is not gradually reshuffling, but narrowing, with entire lineages of native bacteria becoming harder to find in urban guts than in rural ones eating more traditional diets.

This isn't an abstract statistic. It shows up in bodies. The Indian Society of Gastroenterology's own position statement puts GERD prevalence in India between 7.6 and 30 percent, typically under 10 percent in general population studies, but climbing considerably higher in clinical cohorts, a gap that itself points to how much chronic acidity goes unmeasured outside a doctor's office. Layered on top of that is Helicobacter pylori, the bacterium behind most peptic ulcers. A 2025 systematic review pooling 52 studies across 15 Indian states put national prevalence at roughly 54 to 61 percent of adults though the real picture is far patchier than one number suggests, ranging from under 10 percent in Gujarat to nearly 70 percent in Rajasthan. Most of those infected are unaware about carrying it, because the infection is often silent for years before it starts to show.

None of these problems exist in isolation from each other. A gut stripped of the fiber-fermenting bacteria that once buffered it is a gut with less defense against the pathogens moving in, less capacity to regulate inflammation, and increasingly, researchers suspect, it becomes a gut more vulnerable to the metabolic disorders climbing across urban India: rising rates of type 2 diabetes, obesity, and inflammatory bowel disease that track disturbingly closely with the shift toward processed food. Add to that the slow creep of antibiotic overuse, which doesn't just kill the infection it's aimed at but takes out swaths of the resident microbial community along with it, and the picture that emerges isn't of a single disease but of an ecosystem in retreat.

Which is what makes the jar in Bengaluru feel less like a curiosity and more like a time capsule. It's a working sample of what an Indian gut microbiome looked like before the fiber disappeared from the plate, before antibiotics became routine, before "protective bacteria" became something you had to go looking for in a hundred-year-old family heirloom instead of finding it, unremarkably, in everyone's gut.

For years, the default response to gut trouble in India has been the same pill that claims to work everywhere else: a probiotic capsule loaded with Bifidobacterium and Lactobacillus strains isolated from European or American populations. Increasingly, researchers studying the Indian gut say this approach is failing on its own terms. Strains selected for a gut shaped by a Western, lower-fiber, higher-fat diet often don't colonize a gut shaped by centuries of a fiber-heavy, plant-forward Indian diet. It's less like taking medicine and more like transplanting a species built for one climate into an ecosystem that was never going to sustain it.

Indigenous fermented foods like gundruk: the sun-dried fermented mustard greens of the Himalayan belt; kanji: rice fermented overnight into a tangy, faintly effervescent drink; and idli batter itself aren't just old recipes. Researchers increasingly view them as microbial reservoirs, cultivated over generations to survive the specific gauntlet of the Indian digestive tract: the acid, the bile, the long transit to the colon. Some scientists in this space have started using the phrase "microbial decolonization" to describe the shift they're pushing for , away from imported, one-size-fits-all microbial solutions, and toward the diet-specific ecosystems that were already sitting in Indian kitchens the whole time.

Yogesh Shouche, the NCCS scientist whose lab has spent years studying the Indian gut, has traced his own interest in the subject back to a conversation with a pediatrician friend, who told him that commercial probiotics which are built for Western populations simply weren't working for Indian patients, and that almost no one had studied why. That gap is what set Shouche on this path in the first place. In earlier interviews, he's been skeptical that there's even a single "Indian gut microbiome" to speak of and his expectation is that India's diversity will surface as a patchwork of regional and ethnic cores rather than one common baseline, shaped by exactly the geography and food habits now being flattened by urban diets.

That gap between imported solutions and Indian biology has been measured. In the largest gut microbiome study of the Indian population to date, spanning 110 subjects across north and south India and benchmarked against nine other populations worldwide, researchers at IISER Bhopal found that geography and diet leave a distinct signature on the Indian gut, one unlike anything catalogued elsewhere. "Diet has been known to be the key driver in shaping the gut microbiome. Indian population has diverse lifestyles and food habits, and so far, the Indian gut genome is not well explored," says Vineet Sharma, the IISER Bhopal scientist who led the study. It's a fitting admission from the researcher who mapped it most closely: even the most extensive Indian gut study on record is still, by his own account, an early sketch of something far larger.

That reservoir is also feeding into a broader push toward precision medicine in India, where researchers are combining genomic tools with the Ayurvedic concept of prakriti, an individual's constitutional type, in a field some are calling Ayurgenomics. The World Health Organization has flagged India's work integrating artificial intelligence with traditional medicine as a notable development in this space. But that's the second story, not this one. The first story is simpler and more urgent: something is disappearing from the Indian gut faster than science can finish describing it.

Which brings the story back to Bengaluru, to the ceramic jar that has never been washed. It isn't precious because it's old. It's precious because it's still alive, a hundred years of uninterrupted microbial continuity, still doing in a lab today exactly what it did in a Madurai kitchen a century ago. Everything the NCCS study found missing from the modern urban gut is, in some form, still fermenting quietly inside jars like this one, in kitchens most of the country has already stopped keeping.

The scientists studying it aren't chasing a new drug. They're racing to read a record before the last jars stop being refilled, before the grandmothers who know exactly how much rice and how much water stop being around to teach the next generation, before "dark microbiome" stops meaning not yet catalogued and starts meaning gone. The next major advance in Indian gut health may not come from a laboratory at all. It may just come from finally listening to what's been sitting on the counter the whole time, from the simple act of recognition.

Life speaks in the language of molecules, and its grammar is written in DNA. Every gene is a sentence written in the alphabet of nucleotides. When the cell needs to act, that sentence is copied into mRNA, which carries the script from the nucleus to the ribosomes. Then ribosomes take over as translators, reading codons like words, while tRNA delivers amino acids as building blocks waiting to be assembled. Together, they form proteins that give cells their shape and strength. Yet within this process, the cell holds profound mysteries.

We might know the outlines of protein synthesis, but the structural complexity of the molecular machinery that drives it remains elusive. At the Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru (IISc Bengaluru), Tanweer Hussain’s young and dynamic group is trying to understand the molecular and structural basis of protein synthesis and its regulation. This work plays a significant role in understanding disease progression and developing therapeutics- a pursuit that reflects a story of curiosity, challenge, and persistence.

Tanweer Hussain’s scientific journey began during his PhD at the CSIR-Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CSIR-CCMB), where he worked on the editing mechanism of aminoacyl-tRNA synthetase, an enzymes that act like a proofreader, ensuring proteins are built correctly. Gradually, his interest shifted to the broader picture of the protein synthesis machinery. Hussain recounts how his interests evolved as he transitioned throughout his scientific journey.

As I read more about protein synthesis, I was intrigued by how these molecular processes are controlled, which gradually shifted my interest from small domains to mega-complexes like ribosomes.”

During his PhD, he had an opportunity to discuss his research with Venkatraman Ramakrishnan during a visit to CCMB. At that time, Venki had not yet received the Nobel Prize, but his research on ribosomes was widely recognised. Inspired by his work, Tanweer decided to join for a postdoctoral study in Venki’s laboratory for postdoctoral training at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, UK. There, he worked on decoding the structure of the preinitiation complex (PIC), a crucial assembly that initiates protein synthesis, using cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM). Cryo-EM is a technique that flash-freezes biomolecules and visualises them under a transmission electron microscope, allowing researchers to determine their structures at high resolution. Around the same time, the cryo-EM “resolution revolution” was transforming structural biology through advances in detector technology and computational methods, enabling unprecedented views of biomolecular structures.

After years abroad, Hussain returned to India to establish his research group at IISc. His group is trying to understand the hidden regulatory layers of protein synthesis. They focus on how a network of molecular factors called the eIF4F complex regulates mRNA recruitment and ribosomal scanning. If something goes wrong during this process, it can contribute to diseases such as cancer. Hence, these studies have important implications for the development of translation-based therapies. The group is also trying to uncover how viruses exploit these molecular factors to support their own translation and survival. Such insights could eventually help design new antiviral strategies.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, his group looked at how SARS-CoV-2 protein Nsp1 suppresses host protein synthesis through its interaction with host ribosomes. Their findings revealed a molecular tug-of-war between the virus and the host cell.

However, pursuing these questions in a rapidly evolving field has never been straightforward. He spoke about the challenges posed by modern biology, which increasingly demands expertise across multiple disciplines. Nowadays, addressing a research question might require a combination of experimental, structural, and computational approaches, as well as cross-disciplinary collaboration. He further elaborated that staying relevant requires researchers to continuously learn new techniques and make the most of available resources, especially in India, where resources can often be limited.

The discussion on resource and infrastructure constraints in India raises broader questions about the research ecosystem and how these limitations affect early-career scientists seeking to establish independent research programmes. Tanweer acknowledges that the overall research environment is encouraging and supportive for young investigators. However, he believes there is considerable scope for improving financial support for early-career researchers. Given that many positions are now tenure-track ones, researchers often face pressure to establish productive laboratories within a limited timeframe while working with constrained funding, which can restrict their ability to pursue new research directions.

Tanweer recalls the challenges he faced while setting up his own lab. When his group needed computational expertise to study ribosomal mechanisms, access to the necessary resources was limited. As a result, he often adopted a collaborative approach. He firmly believes that collaborating with labs possessing complementary expertise or stronger infrastructure can provide an effective solution to the resource and infrastructure challenges encountered by many Indian scientists.

That trajectory, from navigating resource constraints as an early-career scientist to being an EMBO Global Investigator, marks a journey of resilience and adaptability. Reflecting on his journey as an independent scientist, Hussain shares that being a part of the EMBO Global Investigator Network has meant far more than receiving a prestigious title. It has facilitated meaningful networking with scientists not only in Europe but also provided a platform for showcasing and discussing their research work, while also strengthening connections with peers within India.

However, aside from techniques, institutions, and collaborations, another factor that subtly influenced his scientific path was mentorship. Recounting those years, he speaks about the value of active mentorship, which involves one-on-one interactions and direct guidance on research projects. However, such engagement can often be limited by mentors’ time constraints. What worked better for him, instead, waspassive mentorship—learning not through direct instruction but through observation. Reflecting on this approach, he said:

As a mentee, observing your mentor is crucial to understanding how they address obstacles and stay focused on the real question, which has played a major role in shaping my journey.”

While sharing his experience as a mentee, he advises young researchers to pay close attention and observe how mentors navigate uncertainty, noting that observation often teaches more than instruction. He also emphasises that, despite rapid technological advances, there is still no substitute for hard work and deep reading. Nowadays, AI has become an important tool for gathering and processing information, but he remains cautious about relying on it for scientific judgment. Tanweer acknowledged that AI could excel at mining data; however, when it comes to interpreting results and evaluating subtle scientific nuances, he believes the human mind remains indispensable.

He points out that “In the early days, people had to understand the techniques deeply, but now algorithms make things so easy that it’s tempting to become just a user instead of an expert.” For this reason, he encourages researchers to look beyond algorithm-generated outputs and develop a strong understanding of the underlying science. True expertise, he argues, comes from rigorous study and a deep appreciation not only of results but also of the processes that produce them.

Even with advanced microscopes, algorithms, and cutting-edge technologies, Tanweer still believes that the most powerful instrument in any laboratory is a mind that refuses to stop asking questions.

Every year, scores of hilsa in our oceans swim against the tide towards the head of the Ganga to find suitable breeding grounds. Many will not survive this arduous journey. Yet none shy away from embarking on it. They are guided by ancestral memory, empowering them to instinctively respond to minute changes around them, thus allowing them to survive despite the constant threats in their environment.

While not as dramatic as a life-or-death situation, the early scientific journey of a ten-year-old boy from a small village in Madhya Pradesh was nothing short of an arduous upstream journey against the odds.

Krishanpal hails from a remote and tiny village on the outskirts of Bhopal with fewer than 1,000 inhabitants. He recalls that in his youth, reaching his village from Sehore railway station required a journey involving two buses. He fondly recounts how he and a few other boys his age spent their early Gurukul days in his village learning to read Hindi, practice basic arithmetic and engage in ‘kushti’ (traditional wrestling) in the evenings. It was standard practice for them to help with their Guru's household chores.

Since no one in his village had earned a graduate degree, he had no template to emulate. However, Krishanpal’s life took an exciting turn when he joined Navodaya Vidyalaya in the sixth grade. He was one of only four children selected from his taluk based on an aptitude test that involved logical reasoning, solving puzzles, sequences, and matching patterns— skills that, as he notes, continue to underpin his scientific thinking and research even today.

Krishanpal Karmodiya is currently an Associate Professor at the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Pune (IISER Pune) and an EMBO Global Investigator Network (GIN) member. His team works on piecing together a broader puzzle of what happens to whole cellular systems when one systematically tinkers with its components. They piece together this mystery in Plasmodium, a single-celled parasite that causes Malaria and spends half its life cycle in mosquitoes, with the other half spent wreaking havoc in our bodies.

While often viewed as formidable invaders from our perspective, Plasmodial cells face their fair share of extraordinary challenges too. These cells must figure out not only how to survive in harsh conditions, but also how to thrive in rapidly changing environments. They sequentially move between the gut and salivary glands of a mosquito at 25°C, and then to our liver and blood at 37°C. Despite aeons of evolutionary time to perfect this cycle, these cells now face a new challenge: drugs.

This forms the basis of the central question Krishanpal’s lab is interested in: How can a tiny cell—almost 50 times thinner than human hair at its smallest and equipped with limited genetic material—alter its behaviour rapidly enough to overcome challenges such as the mosquito and human immune systems, as well as chemical drugs?

Much like Plasmodium that must navigate a world filled with obstacles, Krishanpal’s own scientific journey was fraught with hurdles at every turn. While deeply grateful for the opportunity to study in Navodaya, he also recalls struggling to catch up. “Many of my friends were reading and writing comfortably in English, while I was still learning my ABCs”, he says.

Call it desperation or an unwavering determination to escape his circumstances, he managed to pass his class 10 examinations—much to his own disbelief. When asked what Eureka moment set him on the path to science, he says it was not a single moment, but a gradual process. In fact, he admits he only started to enjoy science in his bachelor’s degree.

He became fascinated by the remarkable abilities of microorganisms, recalling how astonished he was to learn that certain bacteria could break down petroleum. He admired the systematic nature of experimental design and marvelled at some of the simplest experiments that revealed profound results.

While he was doing well academically, pursuing science was not something he considered as a long-term possibility. More than anything else, he was primarily driven by a desire for a better life. So when, in his early 20s, he received a call from the National Defence Academy for an interview to become an army officer, he seized the opportunity with both hands. He immediately booked a train ticket to Varanasi from Indore, skipping college tests he declared unimportant at the time. He viewed a stable army job as a far better prospect than farming — the only two livelihoods he had known growing up in his village. The notion of a career in academia was but a distant dream.

But life had other plans.

In hindsight, Krishnapal believes it was sheer luck that he did not get that job. As he boarded his train from Indore for the interview, the Godhra riots broke out, with many cities on high alert. He vividly remembers arriving early in the morning at 0600 hours, tensely waiting for the basic screening scheduled for 0730 hours. Unfortunately, he was rejected at the screening stage because he was missing a required document that had been sent to his village without his knowledge. With no phones and delayed communication in those days, he only learnt about it later.

Looking back, Krishanpal believes that, given his circumstances then, securing that position would likely have diverted him away from science altogether.

He resumed his masters on returning back to Indore, tucking away the disappointment of not making it in the army. After his first year, his seniors at the Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru (IISc Bengaluru) urged him to apply for a master's dissertation in Bengaluru. Sheepishly revealing his lack of communication etiquette, he recounts how he simply packed up his belongings at the end of his first year and went to Bengaluru to ask for an opportunity to work in a lab without sending an email first. Living with his seniors, he visited laboratories at premier institutes such as the IISc Bengaluru and the National Centre for Biological Sciences - Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (NCBS-TIFR) on a daily basis, but to no avail. On one occasion, he even made a plea to a lab manager, who patiently listened before kindly explaining that he had no authority to hire anyone.

Just as he was preparing to give up and return to Indore, fate intervened.

While he was standing in front of a notice board in the Molecular Biophysics Unit at IISc, a tall, formidable man walked by, took notice of him, and spoke to him. It was Avadhesha Surolia, who was then the Head of the Department.

“I still do not know what he saw in me within a couple of minutes of conversation”, Krishanpal reflects.

I recently visited the department and found myself thinking about how small moments like that can completely change the trajectory of a person's life.”

Instead of heading back dejected, Krishanpal was filled with a sense of anticipation after securing a dissertation at IISc Bengaluru. There was no looking back after that. Even though he remembers feeling discouraged after getting rejected from multiple institutions while searching for a PhD, his deep understanding of his dissertation worked in his favour during his interview at Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research (JNCASR), Bengaluru.

His current research lies at the interface of the small-scale molecular tinkering he trained in as a doctoral student and the large-scale molecular patterns he investigated as a postdoctoral student. Such ambitious projects require extensive resources and collaborations. Krishanpal believes that securing the EMBO Global Investigators Network Award would facilitate networking opportunities for his group and advance knowledge in their field and improve disease management.

His group focuses on mapping the genes that Plasmodium rapidly switch on and off under different conditions to combat drugs and adopt chemical disguises that allow them to attack different tissues of the body. The alternative to this rapid on/off mechanism is to wait like a sitting duck for the slow arrival of a mutation that could perhaps be weaponised. This flexibility and resilience of Plasmodial cells to respond to the myriad of changes with “simple” coordinated switches is what Krishanpal’s team wants to understand. Studying this would require one to keep shifting focus from single molecules to organelles and entire cells. While Krishanpal now enjoys traversing up and down the cellular scale to understand the many complexities of Plasmodium, he set his sights on swimming upstream in his own life.

Sometimes, minute incidents can profoundly shape a person's dreams; similar to a tiny, blood-seeking sandfly whose bite can define the path of a microscopic parasite like Leishmania, causing it to adapt and survive in the liver and spleen of a human.

For Budhaditya Mukherjee, it was when he attended a lecture by one of his school alumni delivering a research talk at his school. "I was in my seventh grade, and I heard him speak about radiophysics. Although more than science, the imagery of a scientist — intelligent, confident, ambitious, smart and knowledgeable — captivated me, and I wondered what it is like to be one. This one moment shaped the entire trajectory of my career and helped build my dreams".

Now an Assistant Professor at the Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur (IIT Kharagpur) and a member of the EMBO Global Investigator Network (GIN), he reflects on his journey and finds it interesting how much we humans have in common with the life of a parasite. Much as we try to embrace the good, neglect the bad, and adapt to adversities, Leishmania modulates its chromosomal patterns and genetic makeup through a phenomenon known as genome plasticity to achieve drug resistance.

He found the concept so fascinating that it emerged as the core theme of his lab, and his team now focuses on understanding host-parasite co-evolution using Leishmania as the model pathogen. Drug resistance in leishmaniasis has remained a persistent challenge; so they ask a simple but critical question: instead of eliminating the parasite, how does drug pressure sometimes make it fitter and better adapted to survive? Despite the withdrawal of older drugs like antimonials, resistant parasites continue to infect humans and resist newer therapies too — does Leishmania's genome plasticity make this possible?

Growing up, he defied the usual "engineering vs medical" dilemma, and went on to pursue a BSc in Zoology and then MSc in Genetics. Amid a series of unplanned events, he eventually joined the lab of Syamal Roy at the CSIR-Indian Institute of Chemical Biology (CSIR-IICB), Kolkata for his PhD. Budhaditya attributes this achievement to his parents, who never questioned his choices but rather supported whatever he wanted to study, and to his wife and best friend, Ankita, who, to him, is his "pillar of success".

However, the journey of a parasite that constantly struggles to survive the harsh conditions of the sandfly and the human immune system is as challenging as a human's. When asked about his PhD experience at the lab of Syamal Roy at CSIR-IICB, he reminisced about how the dynamics of drug resistance in Leishmania always bothered him.

As his initial proteomics-based research to decipher drug resistance failed to gain prominence, his side project on the anti-inflammatory molecule interleukin-10 (IL-10) response in Leishmania-infected immune cells gained traction. Eventually, his PhD research revealed that drug-resistant Leishmania parasites utilise host IL-10 to promote drug resistance, rendering the drugs ineffective for killing. His eagerness to know more about infection biology led him to the lab of Dominique Soldati-Favre at the University of Geneva, which significantly trained him in parasite cell biology and genome editing.

Having transitioned from bench to office, Budhaditya recognised substantial differences between being a mentor and a mentee. In his PhD, he was strongly encouraged to think critically and defend his ideas, but in a gentle, supportive way. While during his postdoctoral work, he was pushed through direct, probing questions, often without much cushioning. Apart from his work, the major challenge in his postdoctoral journey was the initial cultural transition in a completely new continent — "I doubted myself more than I expected. There wasn't a quick fix, just patience. Over time, adapting to a new environment, both scientifically and personally, became part of the learning process." It was challenging, but it shaped his independence, precision, and resilience. That shift proved crucial in shaping his current research identity.

Was he adapting and becoming more resistant like Leishmania does in adverse situations?

Contrary to the idea that the journey of a parasite is smooth, most of them actually die, and few emerge victorious. To counter the odds, some resort to manoeuvring human cells in a way that does not pose a threat to kill them. As a young scientist, Budhaditya had some compelling theories about how parasite factors can drive evolutionary changes in parasites' adaptation. Despite his attempts, subtle suggestions to choose a more global and lethal pathogen like the malaria-causing Plasmodium, rather than Leishmania, frequently arose during his interviews or personal interactions. Eventually, his ideas found a home when he received the opportunity to build an independent research team at IIT Kharagpur.

As Budhaditya was almost set to start with his first two PhD scholars on board, they were unexpectedly hit by the COVID-19 pandemic. His lab — fundamentally based on wet-lab experiments — faced multiple challenges with delays, uncertainty and lack of resources. But gradually, through persistence and perseverance, the work started taking shape.

Adapting to changes and evolving together as a group has been key. In many ways, this co-evolution mirrors the very systems we study in the lab. I believe this has taught me a lot, not only about science but things beyond that."

It is through both adversities and support that he transitioned from being a mentee to a mentor. Earlier during his supervision, he stayed closely involved with his PhD scholars, sharing failures and appreciating successes. Over time, he realised that each student is different, with unique motivations and goals.

The correlation between day-to-day experiences and scientific insights gave rise to another solid question in the lab — how adaptations influence where the parasite survives in the body. In conditions like post-kala-azar dermal leishmaniasis (PKDL), where parasites shift from internal visceral organs to the skin, creating long-term reservoirs for transmission, understanding what drives this change in their path or "tropism" is critical. The lab gradually aims to move beyond a drug-centric view of resistance and uncover the broader principles of pathogen adaptability and co-evolution under drug and host pressure, which can combat chronic and relapsing, resistant infections in pathogens with high genome plasticity.

Being a part of the EMBO Global Investigator Network, he admires its vision, which aims to address the fundamental questions of biology, regardless of the kind of model one uses. The ability to exchange unpublished ideas and get feedback from peers and mentors, often outside his immediate field, has the potential to bring fresh perspectives to the questions still unanswered by his lab.

For a complex problem like pathogen adaptation, this kind of cross-disciplinary thinking is invaluable. He also agrees that access to training and advanced facilities is equally important. Many of the questions raised in the lab require technologies and expertise that are not readily available in the institute setting. Through EMBO GIN, his students can gain hands-on experience in cutting-edge approaches rather than relying solely on outsourcing, which is critical for long-term capacity building.

To him, the best part of being one among all in EMBO GIN is the visibility and platform it offers, especially for the students, to connect with the global scientific community. Leishmania is a neglected pathogen, and there are not too many labs that are trying to understand the evolution of drug resistance in this highly adapting parasite. He sees EMBO GIN as an ecosystem that will not only strengthen his current work but also shape how he and his students grow as a lab in the years ahead.

With such a wonderful global initiative giving him confidence, he also feels the necessity for the Indian scientific ecosystem to flourish more. Compared with when he first started as a new PI in India in 2019, he feels the research ecosystem has improved considerably. Initiatives like the Anusandhan National Research Foundation (ANRF) early-career grants have certainly helped, both in terms of increased funding and, importantly, more timely disbursement.

Now, as he slowly moves towards a more experienced phase of his journey as a scientist, he believes we should actively work towards making science more accessible, understandable, and meaningful to different audiences, even though we haven't been traditionally trained to do so. In an era marked by advanced scientific technologies, misinformation seems to be rampant too, and it becomes the responsibility of the scientists to ensure clear and trustworthy communication with the broader public. He also thinks that effective communication is a two-way process, where it becomes equally important to engage with the general public to listen to their insights and incorporate them to develop scientific advancements for real-world application, and ensure that science remains accessible, trustworthy, and relevant to society.

Having experienced YIM from various vantage points, Bodhi shares that the meeting serves as a rare space for extended scientific dialogue across disciplines and for thoughtful faculty engagement. He reflects on YIM’s role in bridging organismal and molecular biology, shaping hiring conversations, and fostering a research culture rooted in long-term thinking, mentorship, and academic community-building.

How has your participation at YIM over the years shaped your perspective on the value and evolution of the meeting?

I did not participate in YIM before joining as a faculty member. My first YIM experience was in 2019, when I represented IISER Berhampur at YIM Guwahati. It was a wonderful experience for me.

For aspiring young faculty members, it provided a valuable opportunity not only to showcase their work but also to interact with potential employers and understand the nuances of faculty recruitment in the country.

YIM brings together scientists from diverse backgrounds and career stages. From your perspective as an evolutionist working in India and a faculty leader, what makes YIM a distinctive platform for creating meaningful scientific connections?

There is a serious dearth of interaction between organismal biologists, especially ecologists and evolutionary biologists, and sub-organismal biologists such as molecular biologists, cell biologists, and biochemists.

YIM has great potential to bring together these diverse yet complementary domains of the biological sciences.

While organismal biologists can benefit from incorporating molecular techniques into their studies, sub-organismal biologists can gain a more holistic biological perspective, develop new questions, and make more informed decisions about study design through such interactions.

As a mentor at YIM 2026, what insights from your academic journey do you hope to share with early-career researchers navigating their paths in academia?

I have witnessed the transformation of the Indian academic landscape over the past one and a half decades. I hope to share insights gained from observing the evolution of the IISER system over the years, particularly regarding institutional growth, expectations, and opportunities for early-career researchers.

You have played a central role in building the Department of Biological Sciences at IISER Berhampur and currently serve as Dean of Student Affairs. How do meetings like YIM contribute to institutional growth, mentorship culture, and the broader research ecosystem in India?

YIM provides an opportunity to meet young, aspiring scientists who may become valuable assets to academic departments. The faculty hiring process often misses nuances of personality and temperament that are crucial for long-term success as a faculty member. Extended interactions at meetings such as YIM allow us to better assess potential colleagues before encouraging them to apply for faculty positions.

Looking ahead, how do you envision this meeting evolving to adapt to the needs of India’s next generation of scientists?

I think YIM is functioning very well and does not necessarily need to evolve into something entirely different. However, I would like to see a stronger focus on ecology and evolutionary biology, both by encouraging researchers from these fields to showcase their science and by motivating recruiters and decision-makers to recognise that many institutions would greatly benefit from hiring more ecologists and evolutionary biologists.

Over the course of a career in biotechnology, learning extends far beyond experiments and publications. It emerges from working with people, navigating uncertainty, confronting failure, and witnessing the real-world impact of scientific work. The reflections below capture key lessons shaped by experience, about teamwork, empathy, resilience, planning, and purpose, that together define what it truly means to build a meaningful and lasting career in biotech.

1. Take time to know the people you work with

I learned early in my career that while an organisation’s brand can attract great talent, it doesn’t retain it — people do. The colleagues, mentors, and leaders you work with shape your experience more than any logo or title ever could. Invest time in getting to know the people around you.

Be the kind of person others want to work with — and work for. In the end, it’s the people around you who make the work worthwhile.

2. Team dynamics

Biotech is never a solitary pursuit. Every breakthrough relies on scientists, clinicians, writers, and many others working together. I once heard team dynamics explained like a Venn diagram — some strengths overlap, but most do not. The best teams recognise and leverage these unique strengths. Bringing people together to work cohesively is what produces the drugs that change the world.

3. Genuine interest in the field

Perhaps the most important driver in research is passion. A genuine interest in biotechnology fuels curiosity, persistence, and the willingness to learn.

Your career isn’t a sprint; it’s a marathon. Genuine interest helps you sustain the journey.

4. Seeing the bigger picture

It’s easy to get caught up in the details of experiments. But stepping back to see the bigger picture and the global context of our work keeps us grounded in purpose.

My biggest learning hasn’t come from a textbook or a research paper, but from witnessing the impact our work has on real lives. That perspective sharpened during the COVID-19 pandemic, when scientists continued working in the lab while much of the world stayed home — layering on safety protocols, working in shifts, and still pushing forward at breakneck speed to deliver solutions the world desperately needed. Their efforts were not only scientific achievements but also profound acts of empathy and commitment to humanity.

5. Empathy

Biotechnology is driven by experiments, data, and precision — but it is also deeply human. During company-wide meetings, we often watched videos of patients whose lives had been transformed by the treatments we helped develop. In those moments, patients shared their journeys — often emotional, always raw — and expressed gratitude to the scientists who gave them a second chance at life. These stories were powerful reminders that behind every cell culture, every assay, and every regulatory milestone is a human being, a family, and a lived experience.

6. Planning

Progress in biotech doesn’t happen by chance. Careful planning — from experimental design to regulatory strategy — transforms ideas into breakthroughs.

Planning gives us the discipline to move forward with intention, while still leaving space for innovation and flexibility. It is the foundation that turns scientific curiosity into structured progress.

7. The value of documentation

Clear and accurate records enable teams to build upon one another’s work, ensure compliance, and maintain the integrity of results.One of the best pieces of advice I received early in my career came from my father, a food technology expert. He told me, “Write your experimental details as if someone across the ocean is going to repeat it without speaking to you.” In biotech, documentation is not just paperwork — it’s the bridge between innovation and trust, turning experiments into evidence and progress into impact.

8. Stepping outside your comfort zone and saying yes to opportunities

Growth happens when we challenge ourselves. Whether it’s taking on a new role, learning a new skill, or exploring an unfamiliar area, stepping outside your comfort zone opens doors to opportunities you may never have imagined.

Don’t fear the unfamiliar — that’s where growth lives.

9. Accepting failure

As the saying goes, drug development is not rocket science; it’s harder than rocket science. In biotechnology, failure is not the opposite of success — it’s part of the path to it.

Experiments that don’t work, projects that stall, or submissions that face setbacks all teach us valuable lessons if we’re willing to learn.

Accepting failure with humility and resilience allows us to adapt, grow, and ultimately move closer to meaningful breakthroughs.

10. Invest in training people

If people are our greatest strength, then training is our greatest investment. Building skills, sharing knowledge, and fostering continuous learning ensure that individuals and teams can thrive in a rapidly changing industry.

11. Leaving the work in a better state

From the smallest task to the biggest project, one guiding principle is to leave the work in a better state than when it was handed to you. This mindset builds continuity, raises standards, and ensures lasting impact.

Good is never the end point — there is always room to make things better.

12. Take time to reflect

From time to time, step back and reflect on your career path — where you are, where you want to be, and what truly matters to you. Be conscious of your choices and intentional about your direction. Reflection brings clarity, purpose, and alignment between what you do and why you do it — an essential habit in a fast-paced industry and an even more fast-paced life.

The more deeply you understand , the more you realise that abundance isn’t about having more; it’s about seeing more.

13. Giving back

Reflect on your own career and the individuals who supported you along the way — those who gave you your first opportunities, mentors who guided you, and colleagues who shared advice that helped you grow. If you are in a position to do so, pay it forward. Be the mentor, the supporter, the believer in someone else’s potential. There’s always someone less experienced or simply earlier in their journey. When we give back, we don’t just support someone else’s future — we enrich our own. It gives us a chance to experience happiness in its purest form — not the fleeting kind that comes from acquiring something new, but the enduring joy that stays with us long after the moment has passed. It is the foundation upon which meaningful human connections are built.

Because ultimately, science is about people. And so is success.

Taken together, these lessons remind me that biotechnology is not just about science; it’s about people, processes, and purpose. And it is the balance of all three that makes this work both challenging and profoundly rewarding.

In her responses, Badrinarayanan emphasised that receiving the Infosys Prize has reaffirmed her commitment to curiosity-driven, long-term research. She described how her work challenges static views of DNA repair by revealing it as a dynamic, cell-wide process shaped by movement, timing, and cellular state. She also reflected on the broader importance of patient, high-risk research, mentorship, and building supportive scientific ecosystems that enable young researchers to pursue ambitious questions.

Congratulations on receiving the Infosys Prize 2025. What does this recognition mean to you at this stage of your scientific career, and how do you see it shaping your future research direction?

Receiving the Infosys Prize at this stage of my career is both affirming and grounding. It is a recognition of long-term, curiosity-driven work that does not always yield quick answers, but steadily builds understanding over time.

Personally, it reinforces my belief in asking difficult mechanistic questions and staying with them over time, even when progress is slow or uncertain.

In terms of future direction, the prize does not redirect my research so much as strengthen my commitment to it. It gives me confidence to continue pursuing ambitious questions about genome maintenance that require interdisciplinary approaches and sustained effort. It also brings a responsibility to contribute more actively to the broader scientific ecosystem — through mentorship, collaboration, and helping build environments where young scientists feel supported in taking intellectual risks.

Your work uncovers new mechanisms of DNA repair. Could you describe how these discoveries reshape our understanding of genome maintenance?

Genome maintenance has traditionally been viewed as a largely local and passive process, where repair proteins act near sites of damage. Our work challenges this view by showing that DNA repair is highly dynamic and organised at the scale of the whole cell. Cells actively mobilise repair machinery, using energy-dependent processes to search for damaged DNA and coordinate repair efficiently. We have also shown that mutagenic DNA repair can operate outside of the conventional boundaries of the cell cycle, including in dormant or non-dividing cells. This reshapes how we think about when and where mutations arise, and suggests that genome modification is not restricted to actively replicating cells. This shifts our understanding of genome maintenance from a static framework to a dynamic one, where movement, timing, and spatial organisation play central roles. It also suggests that genome architecture and cellular state strongly influence how repair unfolds. These insights help explain how cells maintain stability under stress, and why repair outcomes can differ depending on physiological conditions. More broadly, they have important consequences for stability, adaptation, and evolution, highlighting that genome maintenance is not just about individual enzymes, but about coordinated cellular strategies.

Live-cell imaging is central to your research. How is this technology transforming the way molecular biologists investigate dynamic processes inside cells?

Live-cell imaging has fundamentally changed how we study biology by allowing us to observe processes as they unfold in real time inside living cells. For molecular biologists, this means moving beyond static descriptions to understanding dynamics: how molecules move, interact, and respond to changes over time. In our work, this has been critical for studying DNA repair, where key events occur rapidly and transiently, and would be otherwise missed. By following individual cells, we can capture dynamics and heterogeneity that are completely masked in population-averaged experiments. It has also revealed variability between individual cells, showing that even genetically identical cells can behave differently under the same conditions. More broadly, this approach is transforming molecular biology by revealing temporal order, coordination, and decision-making within cells. As imaging becomes more quantitative and integrated with computational analysis, it is enabling researchers to link molecular mechanisms to cellular behaviour in a far more direct and predictive way.

The Infosys Prize often highlights research with potential societal impact. How do you envision your discoveries contributing to long-term advances in disease research or therapeutic strategies?

Many diseases including cancer, neurodegenerative disorders, and age-related conditions are associated with defects in DNA repair and genome stability. While my research is focused on microbial systems, the underlying principles we uncover are often conserved across evolution. Studying these processes in tractable systems allows us to identify core mechanisms that are difficult to dissect in more complex cells. In the context of infectious disease, understanding DNA repair in bacteria is also important for addressing antibiotic resistance, as repair pathways enable microbes to survive stress and evolve rapidly.

I want to highlight that the contribution of fundamental discovery research is often indirect and long-term. Rather than producing immediate therapies, it provides the conceptual foundation that informs future drug targets, treatment strategies, and diagnostic approaches.

In that sense, it shapes the landscape in which applied and clinical research can operate more effectively, and opens new and frontier research directions. In a rapidly changing world, such forward facing, long-term fundamental research is critical to ensure we are future ready.

Frontier research in India often requires deep institutional support. How do you think awards like the Infosys Prize help strengthen basic science ecosystems and inspire confidence in high-risk, curiosity-driven research?

Awards like the Infosys Prize play a vital role in validating discovery science and curiosity-driven research, especially in areas where outcomes are uncertain and timelines are long. By recognising this, the foundation sends a strong message that depth, originality, and persistence matter.

Such recognition goes a long way towards strengthening research ecosystems by increasing visibility for basic science, helping attract talented students and collaborators, and reinforcing institutional confidence in supporting ambitious projects. This is particularly important in India, to encourage researchers to aim for long-term impact.

I feel that beyond individual recognition, these awards help shape scientific culture. They encourage institutions and funding agencies to invest in long-term thinking and create environments where researchers feel supported in taking intellectual risks. Over time, this builds resilience and excellence in the scientific system as a whole.

Many young researchers look up to scientists like you. What message would you like to share with early-career scientists, especially women in STEM, who aspire to pursue challenging, long-term scientific questions?

I would encourage young scientists to give themselves permission to be curious and to be patient with uncertainty.

Scientific questions rarely yield quick answers, and progress often comes through periods of confusion and failure. This is a normal and necessary part of discovery. For women in STEM in particular, it is important to recognise that doubts and obstacles are not personal shortcomings, but structural features of the system. Building supportive networks, seeking mentors, and trusting one’s intellectual instincts can make a tremendous difference. Finally, choose questions that genuinely excite you. Sustained curiosity is what carries you through difficult phases. Science is not a straight path, and success does not look the same for everyone. There is space for diverse voices, styles, and trajectories in research.

Scientific recognition often brings new responsibilities. Do you see this award influencing your roles in mentorship, scientific leadership, or in shaping the broader research culture at National Centre for Biological Sciences (NCBS-TIFR)or beyond?

Scientific recognition does bring a certain sense of responsibility, though I see it more as a continuation than a change. Mentorship has always mattered deeply to me, and that commitment remains central, particularly supporting early-career scientists as they navigate uncertainty and failure. It is important to foster environments where rigorous and creative science can thrive together. At NCBS, which has a strong and vibrant culture of fundamental research, I feel it is important to help sustain and strengthen this environment that values curiosity, rigor, and intellectual risk-taking. That includes encouraging conversations across disciplines and ensuring that young researchers feel confident pursuing original ideas. I do hope to contribute to conversations about how we define and assess scientific success. Moving beyond short-term metrics to recognise depth, integrity, and long-term impact is essential.

Shaping research culture is always a collective effort, but recognition can help give weight and visibility to these conversations.