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Copyright

Aswin Sai Narain Seshasayee

Published On

2025-02-28

Page Range

pp. 5–32

Language

  • English

Print Length

28 pages

1. All creatures great and small

Chapter of: Bacterial Genomes: Trees and Networks(pp. 5–32)
Bacteria are the most numerous form of free-living cellular life on Earth. They were discovered back in the late 17th century by a Dutch draper and microscopist, concomitant with the rise of formal scientific communication. Later, bacteriology found new wind in the second half of nineteenth century through discoveries of their roles in disease and biogeochemical processes. In the first half of the twentieth century, the discovery of antibiotics and bacterial resistance to these drugs led to the rise of medical microbiology. All through this period, a simmering underlying theme in bacteriology and, more broadly, microbiology was the extraordinary metabolic plasticity and adaptability characterizing these organisms.

Contributors

Aswin Sai Narain Seshasayee

(author)
Researcher and Associate Professor at National Centre for Biological Sciences
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7028-1803
http://www.ncbs.res.in/aswin

Aswin Sai Narain Seshasayee is a researcher and Associate Professor at the National Centre for Biological Sciences (NCBS), a centre of Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR) in Bangalore, India. His lab is interested in fundamental aspects of the function and evolution of bacterial genomes and gene regulatory networks. His career in the sciences started off with a Bachelors of Technology at Anna University, Chennai, India, during which a lot of time left alone to explore and break things in the bioinformatics laboratory of Professor Gautam Pennathur and in the experimental microbiology and protein engineering laboratory of Professor Sankaran encouraged him to take up research for a career. He then pursued research as an intern, a PhD student and then briefly a postdoc with Nicholas Luscombe at EMBL-European Bioinformatics Institute, Hinxton, Cambridge, UK (and St John’s College and Girton College, University of Cambridge). He has been with NCBS since December 2010, his research here funded over the years by the Department of Atomic Energy (Govt of India) core support to TIFR and NCBS, Department of Biotechnology, Department of Science and Technology and Science and Engineering Research Board (all Govt of India), CEFIPRA and DBT-Wellcome Trust India Alliance. Beyond science, he enjoys making music, painting watercolour landscapes and reading classic crime and fantasy fiction and popular history.