 Our current opinion on the genetics and development of structural color-producing biophotonic nannostructures in birds is now out in the August 2021 issue of Curr. Opin. Gen. Dev.: 10.1016/j.gde.2021.02.004. (Click here to access the freely available arXiv version!)
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Incredibly proud to announce that my first graduate student, Kwi Shan successfully defended her thesis in flying structural colors (pun intended :)
 10.1098/rspb.2020.1688 Ever wondered why twilight or night-active tarantulas can be so vividly colored with cobalt blues and bottle greens? Our new work with former DBS grad student Saoirse Foley suggests that green color could be used in crypsis while blues possibly in inter- and intra-sexual signalling based on most genera we examined exhibiting a high degree of opsin diversity seen in colorful jumping spiders.
 Feather barbs with directly self-assembled single gyroid photonic crystals. (c) Vinod Saranathan Our latest pre-print out. Check it out on bioRxiv.
10 years after I discovered the first single gyroid (photonic) crystals in biology, in butterfly wing-scales, I have discovered them in the feathers of a family of birds that is endemic to SE Asia... Here is a link to the Yale-NUS College press release:
Yale-NUS PhD Scholarship holder receives award from the Society for the Study of Evolution for research on butterfly wing scales Check out our latest preprint on the evolution of vivid blue and green colors in tarantulas
Laura is now a PhD candidate after passing her qualifying exams!
 An artist rendition by James McKay of the Swiss fossil weevil. Here are links to the article: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsbl.2020.0063
and the accompanying Argonne National Lab and Yale-NUS press releases Grateful to Professor Ulli Steiner and Dr. Bodo Wilts of the Adolph Merkle Institute, University of Fribourg and Professor Damien Vandembroucq, Director of PMMH, ESPCI, Paris for generously hosting me during my sabbatical in Fall 2019
Here is a link to the article: https://academic.oup.com/icb/article/59/6/1664/5489910
Laura Berman, a recent graduate of Juniata College joins our lab as a Yale-NUS Graduate Fellow.
Our mutidisciplinary team bagged a massive CRP20 grant on our first attempt. Feeling grateful.
Erika Loh (Class of 2023) joins us as a student research associate studying iridescence in birds.
Kwi Shan passed her wrritten and oral Qualifying Exams in flying structural colors (pun intended :) Congrats!!
 Listen to Vinod's live TV appearance on Mediacorp Channel News Asia's Singapore Tonight (11 Sep. 2018) Vinod spoke about why "Blue is the warmest color" for the Singapore Science Festival 2018, a weekly seminar series held at Department of Biological Sciences, NUS.
Dr. Bodo Wilts of the Adolph Merkele Institute at University of Fribourg and Vinod published a study on how the rainbow weevil (Pachyrrhynchus congetsus pavonius) is able to tunably produce the rainbow-hued iridescence on a scale-by-scale basis. Here's the official press release from Yale-NUS College.
Kwi Shan and Anupama Prakash organized a symposium on structural color at the at the 2018 Biology of Butter ies meeting, held at National Centre for Biological Sciences (NCBS), Bangalore, India.
Kwi Shan also presented a poster our research on the Development of biophotonic nanostructures in brush-footed butter y wing scales. Vinod's invited book chapter "Topology of minimal surface biophotonic nanostructures in arthropods" was published in the Springer Series in Solid-State Sciences: The Role of Topology in Materials (edited by Sanju Gupta and Avadh Saxena)  Vinod was at the 136th Stated Meeting of the American Ornithological Society, at Tucson, AZ9/4/2018 Vinod presented a talk at the AOS 2018 on the Parallel Evolution of Ordered Feather Barb
Biophotonic Nanostructures. In addition, he also presented Adam's Capstone research on the fruit color preferences of the Southern Cassowary (Casuarius casuarius) as an e-poster. Amazing landscape, disgusting choice of meeting venue (the Hilton El Conquistador in what should have been unconquered Indigenous lands) Vinod spent Mar-August 2018 at the Institiute for Collaborative Biotechnologies (ICBT) based in the lovely campus of University of California, Santa Barbara, studying the development of tunable iridescence in Loliginid squids. Many thanks to Prof. Dan Morse for very kindly hosting and mentoring, and for all the wonderful warm hospitality.  Adam presented a talk on our research on the 45 million years of structural color in the fruits of Elaeocarpus (Elaeocarpaceae) at the 2018 Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology meeting held in San Francisco, CA, USA.
Vinod presented a talk on the Aesthetics and evolution of structural-color producing or biophotonic nanostructures in birds as part of a transdisciplinary symposium, "Travels in Trans-Sensoriality" organised by LaSalle College of the Arts, Singapore, City University of Hong Kong and the Zurich Academy of the Arts and held at LaSalle.
Kwi Shan Seah joins the lab as a PhD student in the Department of Biological Sciences, NUS on a Yale-NUS Graduate Fellowship. Congrats and welcome!
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ABOUT USWelcome to our Evolutionary Photonics lab, where we hang out at the interface of organismal, evolutionary, and developmental biology, soft matter physics, biomaterials, biophotonics, and biomimetics. We are interested in a precise, holistic understanding of bio-photonic nano-structures underlying animal and plant structural coloration (both iridescent and non-iridescent colors; both extant and extinct) in terms of their optical and biological function, development, evolution, and biomimetic and bio-inspired technological applications! News archives
August 2021
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