Mukund Thattai
@thattai.bsky.social
Physicist fascinated by biology, trying to understand how cells work. Also: public engagement, science and culture, puzzles.
To protest the unending Bangalore roadworks, I created a game called Swalpa Adjust Maadi (Kannada for "please bear with the inconvenience"). You play the contractor digging up the roads, the residents are mute spectators who always lose! A new puzzle each day: mthattai.github.io/Swalpa-Adjus...
Swalpa Adjust Maadi
A game where you dig up Bangalore's roads.
mthattai.github.io
Is it bad that I look at this and immediately think: 1. Textbook DNA replication. 2. Bacteria (and some archaea). 3. Eukaryotes (and some archaea). ?
Rather than taking on wingnuts and alien conspiracies, we should do the harder job of confronting the entrenched molecule-centric view of biology, one which conditions students to use precisely such reductionist language to describe the "functions" of genes in their talks, papers and theses.
Simon Fisher@profsimonfisher.bsky.social · last mo.25 years ago, we implicated rare variants of the FOXP2 gene in a severe speech disorder. I’ve spent much time stressing that FOXP2, while interesting, is not the mythical “gene for language”. Weirdly, on occasion I also need to explain why it’s not “proof of aliens”. Full disclosure in this 🧵. 1/n 🧪
#glycotime! Eukaryotic cells can synthesise 1000s of glycans within the same Golgi. What tradeoffs occur when you try to maximise the yield of multiple trees simultaneously? We used a computational model to explore this, now published in @biophysj.bsky.social: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
At a Thai restaurant in the 1970s, Feynman formulated and solved the problem of whether to stick with a favourite dish (ginger chicken) or try something new. 50 years later, his handwritten calculation has been deciphered and shown to be optimal! A fun read @pnas.org: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
This will be on 26 June in Paris! 🤩You are welcome to join and participate in this exciting 1-day conference at the College de France on Biological computational accross areas of biology. Fantastic speakers. Free, no registration, at the heart of Paris on a lovely season. Worth planning a weekend…?
Thomas Lecuit@thomaslecuit.bsky.social · 3mo agoHere is the announcement of a Symposium @college-de-france.fr on 26 June on Information Flow and Computation in Biological systems. A great line of speakers on a variety of topics from embryogenesis to neuroscience, immunology and microbiology. Free entrance, come if you are in Paris end of June 🤩
Why is mercury, but not cadmium, a room-temperature liquid? Why is gold, but not silver, yellow? Why are lead-acid batteries better than tin-acid ones? Amazingly, all these are due to relativistic corrections for electrons travelling close to the speed of light! en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relativ...
Relativistic quantum chemistry - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org
1/35 New preprint! We show that obligate multicellularity removes fundamental population genetic barriers to multicellular adaptation. Even a brief unicellular phase can dramatically constrain the evolution of beneficial multicellular traits. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
Obligate multicellularity circumvents population genetic barriers to collective-level adaptation
Complex multicellularity has evolved in just five lineages (animals, plants, brown algae, red algae, and fungi) and in each case, these organisms develop clonally and are obligately multicellular. While prior work has shown that clonal development plays a critical role in the evolution of complex multicellularity, none has disentangled this from the impact of obligate vs facultative multicellular life cycles. Here we use experimental evolution with engineered snowflake yeast ( Saccharomyces cerevisiae ) to directly test how life cycle structure affects multicellular adaptation. We created isogenic strains capable of switching between unicellular and clonal multicellular phases, then evolved populations for 192 days under obligately multicellular, facultatively multicellular, and obligately unicellular regimes. Obligately multicellular populations rapidly evolved larger size, primarily driven by a whole genome duplication, in all five replicates. Facultative populations showed dramatically constrained evolution, with tetraploidy evolving in only 2/10 facultative populations despite experiments demonstrating that it is strongly beneficial across the full life cycle. Mathematical modeling reveals the mechanistic basis for this constraint: facultative life cycles create establishment barriers through two population genetic effects. Group formation dramatically reduces the number of units of selection, making beneficial multicellular mutations vulnerable to drift. This asymmetry in population size between life cycle phases also allows cell-level selection to overpower group-level selection, eliminating mutations that provide group-level benefits but carry cell-level costs. These findings demonstrate that obligate multicellularity circumvents fundamental population genetic barriers to collective-level adaptation, helping explain why complex multicellularity has evolved exclusively in obligately multicellular lineages, and suggesting similar constraints may operate in other evolutionary transitions in individuality. ### Competing Interest Statement The authors have declared no competing interest. U.S. National Science Foundation, https://ror.org/021nxhr62, DEB-1845363 Howard Hughes Medical Institute Gilliam Fellowship National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship
biorxiv.org
Nice review @thattai.bsky.social ! Very helpful! Little quibble: Margulis didn't independently come up with the idea. In that paper she even cites Wallin for suggesting mitochondria derive from symbionts.
Lynn did acknowledge these earlier authors (e.g., Merechowsky, Wallin), though, in her 1967 paper. "...these ideas are not new..." This is often overlooked, both by people who claim that she "stole" these ideas, as well as those who claim that she didn't become aware of them until later.
The origin story of eukaryotes has more plot twists than a Hollywood blockbuster! 🧵 Read more in my new review: doi.org/10.1146/annu.... Only in the 1960s were the terms "prokaryote" and "eukaryote" formalized! As originally defined, eukaryotes had complex architectures, prokaryotes did not.
Our world could do with 100 Attenboroughs. www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio...
‘The greatest ambassador for life on Earth’: Tributes paid to David Attenborough on his 100th birthday
Naturalist says he has been ‘overwhelmed by greetings’ as milestone is marked with event at Royal Albert Hall
theguardian.com
Out now in @annualreviews.bsky.social: my review on the origins of eukaryotic membrane traffic! I propose that archaea-derived proteins supported a primordial system of tubules to ferry cargo between compartments. Modern coated vesicles may have been a later innovation. doi.org/10.1146/annu...
A Tubules-First Model for the Origin of Eukaryotic Membrane Traffic
The discovery of membrane trafficking proteins in Asgard archaea—the closest archaeal relatives of eukaryotes—reveals the deep evolutionary roots of the eukaryotic endomembrane system. This review syn...
doi.org
Here is the announcement of a Symposium @college-de-france.fr on 26 June on Information Flow and Computation in Biological systems. A great line of speakers on a variety of topics from embryogenesis to neuroscience, immunology and microbiology. Free entrance, come if you are in Paris end of June 🤩
Excited to visit the @alleninstitute.org for the Lake Conference on Emergence and Self-Organization: lakeconferences.org/conf/17d01bb... I'll speak about Affordance Theory, pioneered by JJ Gibson in the 1970s. We use this framework to explore the evolution of eukaryotic endomembranes (see 🧵 below).
Conference - Modeling Life from Cells to Tissues: Emergence and Self-Organization - Lake Conferences
lakeconferences.org
Mukund Thattai@thattai.bsky.social · 4mo agoHow did eukaryotic cells get their Golgi, endosomes, lysosomes and other endomembrane compartments? We show that endomembrane evolution depends on long periods of neutral molecular exploration, punctuated by sudden leaps. New preprint: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
How did eukaryotic cells get their Golgi, endosomes, lysosomes and other endomembrane compartments? We show that endomembrane evolution depends on long periods of neutral molecular exploration, punctuated by sudden leaps. New preprint: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
Preprint from @thattai.bsky.social provides an elegant solution to a profound question: How can evolution – driven by gene duplication, deletion, and mutations produce complex endomembrane systems? Punctuated Evolution of Endomembrane Compartments in Proto-Eukaryotes www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
biorxiv.org
Protocells from three inorganic salts, some formaldehyde and water? They grow? They synthesise organic molecules of core biomolecular classes: amino acids, sugars, lipid-like motifs? And, there are similar structures in today's oceans? Yes! Read on. arxiv.org/abs/2601.11013
De novo emergence of metabolically active protocells
A continuous route from a disordered soup of simple chemical feedstocks to a functional protocell -- a compartment that metabolizes, grows, and propagates -- remains elusive. Here, we show that a homo...
arxiv.org
It was a pleasure talking to Prof. Mahesh Panchagnula of IITM for his podcast. Our conversation went far beyond career advice, covering how living systems work, the role of math in the life sciences, and where groundbreaking discoveries in biology come from. youtu.be/wZeUX3G13pk?...
CRISPR, Vaccines & Biotech: Exploring Life Sciences with Prof. Mukund Thattai | Episode 22
YouTube video by Prof Mahesh Panchagnula
youtu.be
Gutting the humanities will not save the sciences. This piece is worth reflecting on: "The broad liberal arts education Carl Sagan received at the University of Chicago played an important role in his development as a scientist and intellectual." www.loc.gov/collections/...
loc.gov
Paul Cohen@paulecohen.bsky.social · 12mo agothe crisis in which the University of Chicago is now engulfed -- one entirely of its own making, and which has led to the (hopefully temporary) suspension of admissions into numerous PhD programs in the humanities -- represents I think a seismic event in the history of American higher education 1/
I set out to review the evolution of eukaryotic intracellular traffic, but along the way a new hypothesis came into focus: maybe the earliest membrane carriers were tubules, not coated vesicles! New preprint: ecoevorxiv.org/repository/v... Here’s the idea. 🧵
I'll be in Kyoto all week, at the joint meeting of the Asian International Conference on Mathematical Biology & Japanese Society for Mathematical Biology. It features a broad lineup of topics and interesting talks, with speakers from across Asia and the world. pub.confit.atlas.jp/en/event/acm...
pub.confit.atlas.jp
New efforts in conservation and venom research are helping humans and snakes co-exist. So many interesting facts I did not know, in this great piece by Indulekha Aravind. www.thehindu.com/society/indi...
Snakebite capital | What India must get right
Discover how experts in India are revolutionizing snakebite treatment and research to save lives and protect communities.
thehindu.com
A truly unexpected discovery, and an important insight into how "life finds a way"!
Shashi Thutupalli @stpalli.bsky.social · last yr.We have a new paper out on an issue that has been discussed for more than a century -- how can fundamental biophysical constraints on nutrient transport be overcome to solve one of the most significant challenges associated with the evolution of multicellularity? www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
It was great to see the exhibit "South Asia and the Institute" at Science Gallery Bengaluru. MIT played an outsized role in pre- and post-independence India, beginning with the first Indian student in 1882 (when MIT was barely two decades old!) digital-exhibits.libraries.mit.edu/s/south-asia...
Timeline
digital-exhibits.libraries.mit.edu
Raj Rewal, whose iconic brutalist Hall of Nations in New Delhi was demolished by the government in 2017, is also the architect of the National Centre for Biological Sciences campus. The nonagenarian recently shared his striking sketches from the 1960s: www.architecturaldigest.in/story/master....
Map of Asia, Africa and Europe, in the little-known Mollusc projection.
Lots of excitement at the #MCBM workshop as participants image #UExM gels! NCBS pond is packed with biodiversity! Thanks @thattai.bsky.social, Sonia Sen & Anshika Singh for putting together a fantastic workshop. It has been a blast interacting with all the fantastic participants & TAs!
Mukund Thattai@thattai.bsky.social · 2y agoOur workshop has kicked off! Amazing instructors Aditya Nayak, @hiralshah.bsky.social and @stpalli.bsky.social will teach participants from all over India how to use expansion microscopy, holography and a flatbed scanner to study the shapes and structures of protists! www.ncbs.res.in/events/marin...
#blrlitfest on Dec 15th: I'll anchor a panel on "How Science Speaks" with science writers @anilananth.bsky.social and @simonsinghnerd.bsky.social, astrophysicist Annapurni Subramaniam, and structural biologist Venki Ramakrishnan. It's free, do attend! bangaloreliteraturefestival.org/year-2024/sc...
Schedule 2024 - Bangalore Literature Festival 2024
Schedule for Bangalore Literature Festival 2024.
bangaloreliteraturefestival.org