Publications related to Dynamics of the most common pathogenic mtDNA variant m.3243A > G demonstrate frequency-dependency in blood and positive selection in the germline

The role of LRRK2 in lung adenocarcinoma

Lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer-related deaths worldwide and the most common lung cancer subtype is lung adenocarcinoma (LUAD). Frequently mutated genes involve activating mutations in KRAS and loss of function mutations in TP53. LUADs primarily ...

EPFL2024

Reproductive isolation arises during laboratory adaptation to a novel hot environment

Ana Marija Jaksic

Background: Reproductive isolation can result from adaptive processes (e.g., ecological speciation and mutation-order speciation) or stochastic processes such as "system drift" model. Ecological speciation predicts barriers to gene flow between populations ...

BMC2024

Single-mitosis dissection of acute and chronic DNA mutagenesis and repair

Christina Ernst

How chronic mutational processes and punctuated bursts of DNA damage drive evolution of the cancer genome is poorly understood. Here, we demonstrate a strategy to disentangle and quantify distinct mechanisms underlying genome evolution in single cells, dur ...

Nature Portfolio2024

Unraveling mitochondrial dynamics: exploring asymmetries and function through advanced microscopy

Julius Hans Bernd Winter

Still displaying characteristics of their bacterial origin, such as autonomous division, motility, and their own genome, mitochondria remain an elusive component of modern eukaryotes. They produce most of the cell's energy in the form of adenosine triphosp ...

EPFL2024

Drug Screening in C. elegans to identify new pharmacological mitochondrial stress inducers

Amélia Lalou

Mitochondria are essential organelles participating in numerous cellular functions, including energy harvesting, regulation of homeostasis and apoptosis. Changes in mitochondrial number, morphology, and function not only impact cellular metabolism but also ...

EPFL2024

Reanalysis of mtDNA mutations of human primordial germ cells (PGCs) reveals NUMT contamination and suggests that selection in PGCs may be positive

Konstantin Popadin

The resilience of the mitochondrial genome (mtDNA) to a high mutational pressure depends, in part, on negative purifying selection in the germline. A paradigm in the field has been that such selection, at least in part, takes place in primordial germ cells ...

Elsevier Sci Ltd2023

PSGL-1 is an evolutionarily conserved antiviral restriction factor

Chao Jiang, Ying Liu

The arms race between viruses and their hosts shaped the evolutionary history and the genome composition of both parties. Restriction factors are the first-line antiviral effectors encoded by the host genomes and are often conserved through evolution to pr ...

AMER SOC MICROBIOLOGY2023

Secondary structure of the human mitochondrial genome affects formation of deletions

Jacques Fellay, Konstantin Popadin

BackgroundAging in postmitotic tissues is associated with clonal expansion of somatic mitochondrial deletions, the origin of which is not well understood. Such deletions are often flanked by direct nucleotide repeats, but this alone does not fully explain ...

BMC2023

Environment-dependent epistasis increases phenotypic diversity in gene regulatory networks

Florence Gauye, Florian Baier

Mutations to gene regulatory networks can be maladaptive or a source of evolutionary novelty. Epistasis con-founds our understanding of how mutations affect the expression patterns of gene regulatory networks, a chal-lenge exacerbated by the dependence of ...

AMER ASSOC ADVANCEMENT SCIENCE2023

Individual and combined benefits of different nonequilibrium proofreading mechanisms

Paolo De Los Rios, Adélaïde Alice Mohr, Stefano Zamuner, Daniel Maria Busiello

Genome duplication, transcription, and translation are among many crucial cellular processes that need to be performed with high fidelity. However, those extremely low error rates cannot be explained with simple equilibrium thermodynamic considerations. Th ...

Amer Physical Soc2023

The role of the NF-kappaB pathway in Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis pathogenesis

Emma Charlotta Källstig

Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) is a neurodegenerative motor disorder, which results in death within a few years of diagnosis. While the cause of most cases of ALS is unknown, 10% of cases are familial (fALS), and associated with mutations in one of ov ...

EPFL2023

Mutation-Attention (MuAt): deep representation learning of somatic mutations for tumour typing and subtyping

Sebastian Martin Waszak

Background: Cancer genome sequencing enables accurate classification of tumours and tumour subtypes. However, prediction performance is still limited using exome-only sequencing and for tumour types with low somatic mutation burden such as many paediatri ...

2023

Cryo-EM structures and binding of mouse and human ACE2 to SARS-CoV-2 variants of concern indicate that mutations enabling immune escape could expand host range

Henning Paul-Julius Stahlberg, Didier Trono, Priscilla Turelli, Florence Pojer, Sergey Nazarov, Kelvin Ka Ching Lau, Dongchun Ni, Alexander Myasnikov, Emiko Uchikawa

nvestigation of potential hosts of the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2) is crucial to understanding future risks of spillover and spillback. SARS-CoV-2 has been reported to be transmitted from humans to various animals after req ...

2023

Landscapes of DNA Mechanics and Genomes

Thomas Antonin Zwahlen

The local physical properties - such as shape and flexibility - of the DNA double-helix is today widely believed to be influenced by nucleic acid sequence in a non-trivial way. Furthermore, there is strong evidence that these properties play a role in many ...

EPFL2023

Brain mitochondrial diversity and network organization predict anxiety-like behavior in male mice

Maria del Carmen Sandi Perez

The brain and behavior are under energetic constraints, limited by mitochondrial energy transformation capacity. However, the mitochondria-behavior relationship has not been systematically studied at a brain-wide scale. Here we examined the association bet ...

Nature Research2023

Computational Studies for the Design of Metalloenzyme Mimics

Guido Frisari

At present, there is no general standard automated method for engineering metalloenzymes, industrially-relevant systems able to catalyze environmentally friendly reactions. One of the most studied natural metalloenzymes is the second isoform of human carbo ...

EPFL2023

Powering the social brain: Mitochondria in social behaviour

Maria del Carmen Sandi Perez, Dogukan Hazar Ülgen, Silvie Rosalie Ruigrok

A central role of brain mitochondria in regulating and influencing social behaviour is emerging. In addition to its important roles as the "powerhouses" of the cell, mitochondria possess a plethora of cellular functions, such as regulating ion homeostasis, ...

2023

Live Birth of a Healthy Child in a Couple with Identical mtDNA Carrying a Pathogenic c.471_477delTTTAAAAinsG Variant in the MOCS2 Gene

Konstantin Popadin, Valeriia Timonina

Molybdenum cofactor deficiency type B (MOCODB; #252160) is an autosomal recessive metabolic disorder that has only been described in 37 affected patients. In this report, we describe the presence of an in-frame homozygous variant (c.471_477delTTTAAAAinsG) ...

MDPI2023

Disentangle genus microdiversity within a complex microbial community by using a multi-distance long-read binning method: example of Candidatus Accumulibacter

Aline Sondra Adler, Christof Holliger, Julien Maillard, Marco Pagni, Simon Marius Jean Poirier

Complete genomes can be recovered from metagenomes by assembling and binning DNA sequences into metagenome assembled genomes (MAGs). Yet, the presence of microdiversity can hamper the assembly and binning processes, possibly yielding chimeric, highly fragm ...

WILEY2022

A mitochondria-specific mutational signature of aging: increased rate of A > G substitutions on the heavy strand

Jacques Fellay, Stepan Denisov, Konstantin Popadin, Dmitrii Iliushchenko

The mutational spectrum of the mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) does not resemble any of the known mutational signatures of the nuclear genome and variation in mtDNA mutational spectra between different organisms is still incomprehensible. Since mitochondria are ...

OXFORD UNIV PRESS2022