The COVID-19 pandemic has expanded our need for virtual meeting platforms and pushed conference organisers to innovate to ensure that scientific networking continues to flourish in these troubled times. The Monsoon Brain Meeting 2020, held in June 2020, aimed to embrace the virtual format and use it to facilitate discussions on and around neuroscience, as reported here by Annapoorna, one of the attendees of the meeting.

Tuberculosis is a common comorbidity in those infected with HIV/AIDS, and the two conditions are known to exacerbate one another. A new study from researchers at the Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru demonstrates that Mycobacterium tuberculosis, the tuberculosis bacteria, can reactivate dormant HIV within the human body, a process that can potentially be targeted by specific drugs.

The gut microbiome of wild animals can provide a plethora of information related to animal health. However, studies looking at evolutionary and animal health-related issues through the lens of gut microbes are currently lacking in India. A recent study reveals the gut bacterial diversity of Indian Gaur and its domesticated form Mithun.

When selecting sites for laying eggs, female Aedes mosquitoes avoid water puddles that lack predators and choose ones with a few predators instead. Researchers from the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bengaluru, and the Nature Conservation Foundation (NCF), Mysore, explain this puzzling behaviour of Aedes mosquitoes.

One of the main challenges in cancer chemotherapy is how to selectively kill tumour cells while leaving healthy cells alive. Researchers at the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISER) Pune have come up with a novel approach where they use an artificially constructed ion channel and certain biochemical peculiarities of cancer cells to induce cell death in a highly targeted manner.

Early diagnosis is critical for the effective treatment of cancer and there has been a strong push for non-invasive and rapid techniques to detect malignant cells. In a new study, researchers from S N Bose National Centre for Basic Sciences, Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics, and Bose Institute, Kolkata have come up with a method to identify colon cancer cells using a biomarker that can be detected in low levels in bodily fluids.

Macrophages are an important category of immune cells that patrol our body to find and destroy pathogens, often by swallowing them whole - a process known as phagocytosis. A recent study by researchers at the Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science (IACS), Kolkata, has discovered how the physical properties of macrophages change in response to phagocytosis and how this, in turn, affects their function.