India Research Management Initiative (IRMI) - an initiative for building research capacity in India.

Research and innovation are growing in India with significant investments being made towards institutions, researchers and research infrastructure. Although still under 1% of GDP, funding for science and technology in India has increased each year for over two decades. There is also increasing realization that public funding for research should be supplemented with that from industry and philanthropy.

An arthropod cis-regulatory element functioning in sensory organ precursor development dates back to the Cambrian.

Background: An increasing number of publications demonstrate conservation of function of cis-regulatory elements without sequence similarity. In invertebrates such functional conservation has only been shown for closely related species. Here we demonstrate the existence of an ancient arthropod regulatory element that functions during the selection of neural precursors.

Evolution of cis-regulatory sequences in Drosophila.

Altered expression of genes during development is one mechanism that might underlie morphological diversity in animals. Comparison has shown that differences in gene expression often correlate with differences in morphology between species. However, many of these examples involve slowly evolving traits between widely diverged taxa, making investigation of how such changes came about all but impossible.

NF-kappaB/Rel-mediated regulation of the neural fate in Drosophila.

Two distinct roles are described for Dorsal, Dif and Relish, the three NF-kappaB/Rel proteins of Drosophila, in the development of the peripheral nervous system. First, these factors regulate transcription of scute during the singling out of sensory organ precursors from clusters of cells expressing the proneural genes achaete and scute. This effect is possibly mediated through binding sites for NF-kappaB/Rel proteins in a regulatory module of the scute gene required for maintenance of scute expression in precursors as well as repression in cells surrounding precursors.

Drosophila TGIF is essential for developmentally regulated transcription in spermatogenesis.

We have investigated the role of TGIF, a TALE-class homeodomain transcription factor, in Drosophila development. In vertebrates, TGIF has been implicated, by in vitro analysis, in several pathways, most notably as a repressor modulating the response to TGFbeta signalling. Human TGIF has been associated with the developmental disorder holoprosencephaly.