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by Srinivas Rao – It has been since almost 3 years since I joined as a technical person to handle Gas Chromatography-Mass Spectrometry (GCMS) Instrument.

My journey in this lab started with the Jyothi Nair’s Project of Blackbuck samples from Dr. Uma Ramakrishnan’s  lab and followed by more than 10+ collaborative works in progress.

It gives me an immense pleasure to work on samples from Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs) from dung piles of Blackbuck, Coffee plants, Tecoma flowers,  Wood samples, Transgenic potato and tomato plants, Essential oils of Artemisia extracts, Species of oak borer larva, Butterfly caterpillars, Areca nut beetles, Volatiles collected from interactions between  endophytic Trichoderma sp. fungi, Butterfly pheromones, Cuticular hydrocarbons from Honeybees, Insect pheromones, Mosquito repellants, and more!

With a wide range of samples to work on,, I am excited to analyze the VOCs from different species of plants and animals to know much more aspects about their chemistry and biology, which in turn, open new and exciting opportunities for empirical research in Chemical Ecology.

Let’s look at the number of samples so far:

It has been 03 years  that our Instrument has been functioning, till now the samples run is:

2015: 1201 samples
2016: 2700
2017: 2257
2018: 798 and counting!

With more than 6000+ samples analyzed from dawn to dusk, this robust GCMS Instrument shall be the Queen of Chemical Ecology!

Photo of Blackbuck Lekking by Rupsy Khurana

The NICE Lab is pleased to announce the release of our newest publication in collaboration with Uma Ramakrishnan at NCBS on in situ sampling of Blackbuck volatiles related to lek mating. You can read the study here.

Special Congratulations to Jyothi Nair, member of the Ramakrishnan lab and honorary member of the NICE lab as well as VS Pragadheesh, former postdoc and current scientist at IICB in Kolkata.