Publications associées à Task-dependent influence of genetic architecture and mating frequency on division of labour in social insect societies

Meeting our Makers: Uncovering the cis-regulatory activity of transposable elements using statistical learning

The adaptation of organisms to their environment depends on the innovative potential inherent to genetic variation. In complex organisms such as mammals, processes like development and immunity require tight gene regulation. Complex forms emerge more often ...

EPFL2024

A Biohybrid Superorganism - Investigating honeybees' collective behaviors via interactive robotics

Rafael Botner Barmak

Social insects, such as ants, termites, and honeybees, have evolved sophisticated societies where the collaborative efforts of "simple" individuals can lead to the emergence of complex dynamics. The reliance of each organism on the collective is so great t ...

EPFL2024

Biohybrid Superorganisms—On the Design of a Robotic System for Thermal Interactions With Honeybee Colonies

Francesco Mondada, Robert Matthew Mills, Rafael Botner Barmak, Raphael Cherfan

Social insects, such as ants, termites, and honeybees, have evolved sophisticated societies where collaboration and division of labor enhance survival of the whole colony, and are thus considered “superorganisms”. Historically, studying behaviors involving ...

2024

Targeted worker removal reveals a lack of flexibility in brood transport specialisation with no compensatory gain in efficiency

Laurent Keller, Mahmut Selman Sakar, Fazil Emre Uslu

Division of labour is widely thought to increase the task efficiency of eusocial insects. Workers can switch their task to compensate for sudden changes in demand, providing flexible task allocation. In combination with automated tracking technology, we de ...

Nature Research2024

The dynamic genetic determinants of increased transcriptional divergence in spermatids

Christina Ernst

Cis-genetic effects are key determinants of transcriptional divergence in discrete tissues and cell types. However, how cis- and trans-effects act across continuous trajectories of cellular differentiation in vivo is poorly understood. Here, we quantify al ...

Nature Portfolio2024

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

Wide-scale identification of novel/eliminated genes responsible for evolutionary transformations

Daria Korotkova

BackgroundIt is generally accepted that most evolutionary transformations at the phenotype level are associated either with rearrangements of genomic regulatory elements, which control the activity of gene networks, or with changes in the amino acid conten ...

2023

Identifying genetic and dietary modulators of metabolic disorders using systems genetics

Xiaoxu Li

Long-term consumption of lipid-rich foods can contribute to common metabolic diseases and systemic low-grade inflammation. However, dietary responses and the development of non-communicable diseases are shaped by genetic factors and gene-by-environment int ...

EPFL2023

Statistical learning quantifies transposable element-mediated cis-regulation

Didier Trono, Julien Léonard Duc, Alexandre Coudray, Cyril David Son-Tuyên Pulver, Shaoline Sheppard, Evaristo Jose Planet Letschert, Raphaël Gérard Théodore Michel Marie de Deloÿe et Fourcade de Fondeville, Julien Paul André Pontis, Delphine Yvette L Grun

Background: Transposable elements (TEs) have colonized the genomes of most metazoans, and many TE-embedded sequences function as cis-regulatory elements (CREs) for genes involved in a wide range of biological processes from early embryo- genesis to innate ...

2023

DNA modifications impact natural transformation of Acinetobacter baumannii

Christian Iseli, Nicolas Jean Philippe Guex, Melanie Blokesch, Nina Vesel, Alexandre Lemopoulos

Acinetobacter baumannii is a dangerous nosocomial pathogen, especially due to its ability to rapidly acquire new genetic traits, including antibiotic resistance genes (ARG). In A. baumannii, natural competence for transformation, one of the primary modes o ...

2023

An Autonomous Robotic Platform to Manipulate Collective Behavior in Ants

Matthias Rüegg

Eusocial life is characterized by division of labour, collective decision making and self organization, and regarded as the highest form of social organisation in groups. Ants are a model organism for research in collective behavior and the evolution of eu ...

EPFL2023

Generation of a Gal4-dependent gene recombination and illuminating mouse

Freddy Radtke

Cell labeling technologies, including the Cre/loxP system, are powerful tools in developmental biology. Although the conventional Cre/loxP system has been extensively used to label the expression of specific genes, it is less frequently used for labeling p ...

INT PRESS EDITING CENTRE INC2022

Genomic consequences of colonisation, migration and genetic drift in barn owl insular populations of the eastern Mediterranean

Nicolas Jean Philippe Guex, Eléonore Lavanchy

The study of insular populations was key in the development of evolutionary theory. The successful colonisation of an island depends on the geographic context, and specific characteristics of the organism and the island, but also on stochastic processes. A ...

2022

Integrative transcriptome analyses of Transposable Elements (TEs) and genes contribute to a better understanding of colorectal cancer

Eunji Shin

Cancer is the second leading cause of death worldwide. Cancer develops through multiple hallmark functions including apoptosis evasion, unlimited replicative potential, metastasis, and immune avoidance. Over the past few decades, researchers have reported ...

EPFL2022

Host genomics of SARS-CoV-2 infection

Jacques Fellay, Christian Axel Wandall Thorball

SARS-CoV-2 infected a large fraction of humans in the past 2 years. The clinical presentation of acute infection varies greatly between individuals, ranging from asymptomatic or mild to life-threatening COVID-19 pneumonia with multi-organ complications. De ...

SPRINGERNATURE2022

Towards mouse genetic-specific RNA-sequencing read mapping

Maxime Jan, Ioannis Xenarios

Genetic variations affect behavior and cause disease but understanding how these variants drive complex traits is still an open question. A common approach is to link the genetic variants to intermediate molecular phenotypes such as the transcriptome using ...

2022

GCN2 adapts protein synthesis to scavenging-dependent growth

Hsin-Jung Li

Pancreatic cancer cells with limited access to free amino acids can grow by scavenging extracellular protein. In a murine model of pancreatic cancer, we performed a genome-wide CRISPR screen for genes required for scavenging-dependent growth. The screen id ...

2022

Population structure and signals of local adaptation in Eugenia uniflora (Myrtaceae), a widely distributed species in the Atlantic Forest

Elia Vajana

Evolutionary diversity in species can arise in many ways, including local adaptation. Despite the global importance of tropical forest ecosystems, few studies have explored patterns of local adaptation in tropical tree species. We investigated population g ...

OXFORD UNIV PRESS2022

The genetic architecture of complex human traits at the dawn of genomic medicine

Olivier Noël Marie Naret

The focus of the work presented in this thesis is the exploration of the genetic architecture of complex human traits - at the dawn of genomic medicine. The underlying mechanisms explaining the enormously polygenic nature of most human complex traits are ...

EPFL2021

Toward a mechanistic understanding of variable chromatin modules

Gerard Llimos Aubach

Our genome is a long sequence of DNA that contains all the information to be able to constitute a living organism like us, similarly to what the letters in a book do to create a story. This sequence, which is a stretch of molecules called nucleotides, is a ...

EPFL2021