R. K. Narayanswami B.A.B.L. Engine Driver : Story-Telling and Memory in The Grandmother’s Tale, and Selected Stories

Much like the Nambi of this tale, R. K. Narayan has merited his reputation as a marvelous storyteller. Noted for his laser-beam focus on the closely-imagined Malgudi, he has come to be recognized as the Indian novelist, from whose pen many readers expected all the accumulated wisdom of the subcontinent\u27s abiding concern for transcendence. While such guru-ization amused Narayan, it also elicited his quietly sustained argument against procrustean templates by which the west insisted on reading him as typically Indian.

L’Inde en rupture de pouvoirs

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Adiu Jolbert

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Pervasive tandem duplications and convergent evolution shape coral genomes

Abstract Background Over the last decade, several coral genomes have been sequenced allowing a better understanding of these symbiotic organisms threatened by climate change. Scleractinian corals are reef builders and are central to coral reef ecosystems, providing habitat to a great diversity of species. Results In the frame of the Tara Pacific expedition, we assemble two coral genomes, Porites lobata and Pocillopora cf. effusa, with vastly improved contiguity that allows us to study the functional organization of these genomes. We annotate their gene catalog and report a relatively higher gene number than that found in other public coral genome sequences, 43,000 and 32,000 genes, respectively. This finding is explained by a high number of tandemly duplicated genes, accounting for almost a third of the predicted genes. We show that these duplicated genes originate from multiple and distinct duplication events throughout the coral lineage. They contribute to the amplification of gene families, mostly related to the immune system and disease resistance, which we suggest to be functionally linked to coral host resilience. Conclusions At large, we show the importance of duplicated genes to inform the biology of reef-building corals and provide novel avenues to understand and screen for differences in stress resilience

Telomere DNA length regulation is influenced by seasonal temperature differences in short-lived but not in long-lived reef-building corals

Abstract Telomeres are environment-sensitive regulators of health and aging. Here,we present telomere DNA length analysis of two reef-building coral genera revealing that the long- and short-term water thermal regime is a key driver of between-colony variation across the Pacific Ocean. Notably, there are differences between the two studied genera. The telomere DNA lengths of the short-lived, more stress-sensitive Pocillopora spp. colonies were largely determined by seasonal temperature variation, whereas those of the long-lived, more stress-resistant Porites spp. colonies were insensitive to seasonal patterns, but rather influenced by past thermal anomalies. These results reveal marked differences in telomere DNA length regulation between two evolutionary distant coral genera exhibiting specific life-history traits. We propose that environmentally regulated mechanisms of telomere maintenance are linked to organismal performances, a matter of paramount importance considering the effects of climate change on health