Hi friends! I am Ravindra Pushker, Graduate Student in the field of Bioinformatics at Complex & Adaptive Systems Laboratory (CASL) and Conway Institute of Biomolecular & Biomedical Research, University College Dublin (UCD), Ireland. I started my PhD in April, 2006 under the supervision of Prof. Denis Shields and Dr. Jean-Marc Jacqué. I worked earlier as Bioinformatics Research Fellow at Evolutionary Genomics Group, Universidad Miguel Hernández, Alicante, Spain with Prof. Francisco Rodríguez-Valera and Dr. Alex Mira.
Certain genomic characteristics of prokaryotes can be used to study the impact of ancient human activities on microorganisms. Bacteria specialised in human-associated niches underwent an intense transformation after the social and demographic changes that took place with the first Neolithic settlements. These genomic changes are absent in related species that are not specialised in humans. [More]
Planet Earth should be called Planet Ocean instead. The oceans, not only cover most of its surface, they are the cradle of all life and modulate the atmosphere's composition and climate. Still this major global ecosystem has been largely ignored by humans except for harvesting some of their upper tropic layers. [More]
The relative content of paralogous genes in bacterial genomes increases with genome size, largely due to the expansion of gene family size in large genomes. Gene family size is also influenced by sequence divergence and physiological function. Large gene families show wider sequence divergence, suggesting they are probably older, and certain functions are overrepresented. [More]
Although pseudogenes can persist for long time periods, they are effectively silenced. This reduces the metabolic investment on faulty proteins. However, it is unclear whether mutation accumulation on regulatory regions is neutral or whether it is accelerated by selection. [More]
Updated images of Manipal, a small town in Karnataka where Manipal University, one of the biggest universities in India is present.
Updated images of Mysore, Karnataka, India, the city of Tipu Sultan.
Updated images of Jakkasandra Lake, a small lake in Bangalore, India.
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