Dr. Vinay Sagar
- Post-doctoral Researcher
Contact Info
Research —
Faculty Sponsor: Dr. Katya Mack
Vinay is an evolutionary biologist interested in the evolution of phenotypes, their genetic mechanisms and micro-evolutionary drivers. In the past, Vinay has worked with natural and captive populations of tigers to understand evolutionary forces driving their rare phenotypes using population genomics tools. In the Mack lab, he studies the gene regulatory variation associated with adaptation to environmental change in house mice, by integrating molecular, population genomic, and computational approaches.
Selected Publications —
V. Sagar, et al., High frequency of an otherwise rare phenotype in a small and isolated tiger population. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. 118 (2021) https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2025273118
M. Aylward, V. Sagar, M. Natesh, U. Ramakrishnan. How methodological changes have influenced our understanding of population structure in threatened species: insights from tiger populations across India. Philos. Trans. R. Soc. B Biol. Sci. 377 (2022) https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2020.0418
C. Tamadaddi, V. Sagar, A. K. Verma, and C. Sahi. Expansion of the evolutionarily conserved network of J-domain proteins in the Arabidopsis mitochondrial import complex. Plant Mol Biol 105, 385–403 (2021) https://doi.org/10.1007/s11103-020-01095-8
Selection Presentations:
Sagar, V., 2024, Does structural connectivity translate to functional connectivity for tigers in Northeast India? Talk presented at the Indian Wildlife Ecology Conference, National Centre for Biological Sciences, Bangalore, India, June 2024
Sagar, V., 2023, How does harmful genetic variation affect the individual? Characterizing deleterious mutations in a small populations of captive tigers. Poster presented at the SMBE Satellite Meeting on Molecular Evolution in Small Populations, Princeton University, Princeton, USA, June 2023
Sagar, V., 2022, What does the occurrence of rare variants mean for the well-being of populations? Talk presented at the Wellcome Connecting Science – Conservation Genomics at the Population Level Conference, Wellcome Genome Campus, Hinxton, Cambridge, UK, December 2022
Sagar, V., 2019, Black is the new orange – The melanistic tigers. Talk presented at the Student Conference on Conservation Science, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, India, October 2019
Awards/Honors:
TIFR Graduate Student Fellowship from Dept. of Atomic Energy, Govt. of India; 2016 - 2022
INSPIRE Fellowship from Dept. of Science and Technology, Govt. of India; 2011 - 2016