Prof. Vidyanand Nanjundiah

Research Area

My interests lie in the areas of developmental biology, theoretical biology and evolution. They range over cell signalling, pattern formation, population genetics and social behaviour. I was involved in demonstrating that cyclic AMP is amplified and relayed during communication in the social amoeba Dictyostelium discoideum. Together with Sharat Chandra, I suggested that genetic imprinting may have co-evolved with sex-determination and gamete dimorphism.

Using a genetic algorithm model, Behera and I showed that phenotypic plasticity could speed up evolution. Based on experimental findings, I have made a case for spontaneous self-organisation as the basis of cell aggregation in the Dictyostelid amoebae and multicellularity in general. The implication is that kinship is unlikely to be essential for the origin of cooperation among cells.

Research Projects

After leaving the Indian Institute of Science, I have not been involved in experimental work myself. I continue to explore 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). An ongoing project with colleagues in CHG and IBAB looks at intra-species genomic differences in D. giganteum and its correlation with social behaviour. I teach an annual course on Evolutionary Biology to Master’s students at the Centre for Human Genetics.

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Publications

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Nanjundiah, V. “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., “Obaid Siddiqi and the Growth of Molecular Biology in TIFR.” Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Indian National Science Academy 42: 1-7 (2016).
Nanjundiah V, Ruiz-Trillo I, Kirk D., “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).
Rao V, Nanjundiah V., “Haldane’s view of natural selection.” Journal of Genetics 96: 765-772 (2017).
Hamant O, Bhat R, Nanjundiah V, Newman SA., “Does resource availability help determine the evolutionary route to multicellularity? Evolution and Development”, 21: 115-119 (2019).
Nanjundiah V., “John Tyler Bonner (1920-2019).” Current Science, 116: 1258-1261 (2019).
Nanjundiah, V., “A response to Lisa Sideris” in Christian Theology and Climate Change. Eds. EM Conradie and HP Koster, London: T&T Clark Handbooks – ISBN: 9780567675170 (2019).
Nanjundiah, V., “Many Roads Lead to Rome: Neutral Phenotypes in Microorganisms.” J. exp. Zool. Part B 332 (8): 339-348. (2020).
Arias Del Angel, J.A., Nanjundiah, V., Benítez, M. et al., “Interplay of mesoscale physics and agent-like behaviors in the parallel evolution of aggregative multicellularity.” EvoDevo 11, 21 (2020).
Nanjundiah, V., “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., Geeta, R. & Suslov, V.V., “Revisiting N.I. Vavilov’s The Law of Homologous Series in Variation (1922)”. Biol Theory 17, 253–262 (2022).
Nanjundiah, V., “Why study evolution?” Confluence, Indian Academy of Sciences. (2023).
Lloyd, D., Nanjundiah, V., Engelmann, W. Johnsson, A., “Ultradian rhythms: Life’s dance to the music of time”, J Biosci 48, (2024).
Mayo, O., Nanjundiah, V., “Reflections on assortative mating, social stratification and genetics”, Journal of Genetics 103:15 (2024).
Newman, SA, Benítez, M, Bhat, R, Glimm, T, Kumar, KV, Nanjundiah, V, Nicholson, DJ, Sarkar, S., “Agency in the Evolutionary Transition to Multicellularity”, Q Rev Biol 100(2): 83-118 (2025).