Vidyanand Nanjundiah
ProfessorProf. Nanjundiah's scientific contributions are in the areas of developmental biology, theoretical biology and evolution. They range over cell signalling, pattern formation, population genetics and social behaviour. He was involved in demonstrating that cyclic AMP is amplified and relayed during communication in the social amoeba Dictyostelium discoideum. He has shown that self-organisation via co-operative signalling can explain cell aggregation as well as the origin of multicellularity, and that kinship is unlikely to be important for the maintenance of cooperation in this system. Together with Sharat Chandra, he suggested that imprinting may have co-evolved with sex-determination and gamete dimorphism. He has used genetic algorithms to model phenotypic plasticity and evolutionary change.
Current research
After leaving DBG, I have not been involved in experimental work. However, I continue to explore evolutionary questions, in particular the evolution of social behaviour in microorganisms. A recent interest is to understand agency, how it shifts from individuals to groups, and to what extent it can be explained as a consequence of physics and chemistry (i.e., without invoking natural selection for the evolution of group-level agency). I teach an annual course on Evolutionary Biology to Master’s students at the Centre for Human Genetics (http://www.chg.res.in/www.chg.res.in/index.html). Also, I do some general writing.
Selected publications (Post-DBG)
(1) “Cellular slime mold development as a paradigm for the transition from unicellular to multicellular life.” In 'Multicellularity: Origins and Evolution'. Eds. KJ Niklas and SA Newman. MIT Press, Cambridge (USA) (2016). Nanjundiah V.
(2) “Obaid Siddiqi and the Growth of Molecular Biology in TIFR.” Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Indian National Science Academy 42: 1-7 (2016).
(3)“Protists and multiple routes to the evolution of multicellularity.” In 'History of Evolutionary Cell Biology'. Eds. B Hall and S Moody. CRC Press, Boca Raton (2017). Nanjundiah V, Ruiz-Trillo I, Kirk D.
(4) “Haldane's view of natural selection.” Journal of Genetics 96: 765-772 (2017). Rao V, Nanjundiah V.
(5) “Does resource availability help determine the evolutionary route to multicellularity? Evolution and Development”, 21: 115-119 (2019). Hamant O, Bhat R, Nanjundiah V, Newman SA.
(6) “John Tyler Bonner (1920-2019).” Current Science, 116: 1258-1261 (2019). Nanjundiah V.
(7) “Many Roads Lead to Rome: Neutral Phenotypes in Microorganisms.” J. exp. Zool. Part B 332 (8): 339-348. (2020). Nanjundiah, V.
(8) “Interplay of mesoscale physics and agent-like behaviors in the parallel evolution of aggregative multicellularity.” EvoDevo 11, 21 (2020). Arias Del Angel, J.A., Nanjundiah, V., Benítez, M. et al.
(9) “Early thoughts on phenotypic plasticity in development and evolution.” In PHENOTYPIC SWITCHING. Implications in Biology and Medicine; eds. H. Levine, M. K. Jolly, P. Kulkarni and V. Nanjundiah, Academic Pr., London, pp xxi-xxxix). 2020. Nanjundiah, V.
(10) “Revisiting N.I. Vavilov’s The Law of Homologous Series in Variation (1922)”. Biol Theory 17, 253–262 (2022). Nanjundiah, V., Geeta, R. & Suslov, V.V.
(11) “Why study evolution?” Confluence, Indian Academy of Sciences. http://confluence.ias.ac.in/why-study-evolution/. 2023. Nanjundiah, V.
