Publications associées à Towards an Autonomous Evolution of Non-Biological Physical Organisms

Reconstruction and analysis of genome-scale metabolic networks in single organisms and microbial communities

Microorganisms are a key component in the chain of life. They are essential for agriculture, produce a large proportion of oxygen, and play a central role in the cycle of elements. Microorganisms are widely used in the production of food and alcoholic beve ...

EPFL2024

Teacher-Mediated and Student-Led Interaction with a Physics Simulation: Effects on the Learning Experience

Denis Gillet, Juan Carlos Farah

Computer simulations are often used as support material for science education, as they can engage students through inquiry-based learning, promote their active interaction in the experimentation phase, and help them visualize abstract concepts. For instanc ...

2024

Industrial Biotechnology Conservation Processes: Similarities with Natural Long-Term Preservation of Biological Organisms

Nathalie Hirt-Burri, Philippe Abdel Sayed, Corinne Scaletta, Lee Ann Laurent-Applegate, Laurent Alexis Clément Vannay, Alexis Laurent

Cryopreservation and lyophilization processes are widely used for conservation purposes in the pharmaceutical, biotechnological, and food industries or in medical transplantation. Such processes deal with extremely low temperatures (e.g., -196 degrees C) a ...

MDPI2023

Elastocapillary menisci mediate interaction of neighboring structures at the surface of a compliant solid

John Martin Kolinski

Surface stress drives long-range elastocapillary interactions at the surface of compliant solids, where it has been observed to mediate interparticle interactions and to alter the transport of liquid drops. We show that such an elastocapillary interaction ...

2023

Functional and structural characterization of polyphosphate-accumulating organisms in aerobic granular biofilms

Arnaud Michel Gelb

The "Aerobic Granular Sludge" (AGS) technology for wastewater treatment is based on dense microbial biofilm in the form of granular aggregates that have an excellent settling property allowing high biomass concentrations in bioreactors. This promising biol ...

EPFL2023

Glacier-Fed Stream Biofilms Harbor Diverse Resistomes and Biosynthetic Gene Clusters

Leïla Ezzat, Vincent Henri De Staercke, Tom Ian Battin, Paraskevi Pramateftaki, Hannes Markus Peter, Matteo Tolosano, Michail Styllas, Tyler Joe Kohler, Stylianos Fodelianakis, Massimo Bourquin, Susheel Bhanu Busi, Grégoire Marie Octave Edouard Michoud

Antimicrobial resistance is an omnipresent phenomenon in the anthropogenically influenced ecosystems. However, its role in shaping microbial community dynamics in pristine environments is relatively unknown. ...

AMER SOC MICROBIOLOGY2023

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

Microfluidic culture platforms for C. elegans bacterial interaction and digestion studies at single-organism resolution

Vittorio Viri

Increasing interest in understanding fundamental biological processes, among which aging and nutrition, has led to the study of simple and powerful model organisms, as the round-worm Caenorhabditis elegans (C. elegans). The nematode, selected by Sydney Bre ...

EPFL2021

Approaches to Test the Neurotoxicity of Environmental Contaminants in the Zebrafish Model: From Behavior to Molecular Mechanisms

Anze Zupanic, Sarah-Katharina Könemann, Colette vom Berg

The occurrence of neuroactive chemicals in the aquatic environment is on the rise and poses a potential threat to aquatic biota of currently unpredictable outcome. In particular, subtle changes caused by these chemicals to an organism's sensation or behavi ...

2021

New and improved methods for integrated models of metabolism and gene expression

Pierre Guy Rémy Salvy

The beginning of the 21st century was marked by the advent of disruptive technologies, which ushered an era of groundbreaking advances in fundamental sciences, carried by the great pace at which computational capabilities spread and evolved. But the new ce ...

EPFL2021

Biotechnology Applications of Nanocarbons in Plant and Algal Systems

Ardemis Anoush Boghossian, Alessandra Antonucci, Alice Judith Gillen

The unique combination of structural, optical, and electronic properties of nanocarbons (NCs) has made these materials particularly attractive for various applications in biotechnology and biomedicine, ranging from sensing, gene-delivery, bioimaging and th ...

Royal Society of Chemistry2021

Interaction of Fluorescent Single-Walled Carbon Nanotubes with Photosynthetic Microbes

Alessandra Antonucci

The discovery of carbon-based nanomaterials has impacted a variety of research areas in ways that could not be imagined three decades ago. Their unique combination of structural, optical, and electronic properties has made these nano-sized materials partic ...

EPFL2020

The social nature of mitochondria: Implications for human health

Maria del Carmen Sandi Perez

Sociality has profound evolutionary roots and is observed from unicellular organisms to multicellular animals. In line with the view that social principles apply across levels of biological complexity, a growing body of data highlights the remarkable socia ...

2021

Do chance encounters between heterogeneous cells shape the outcome of tuberculosis infections?

John McKinney, Ophélie Rutschmann, Chiara Toniolo

The sum of all of the interactions between single bacteria and host cells determines if an infection is cleared, controlled, or progresses at the whole host-organism level. These individual interactions have independent trajectories defined by diverse and ...

2020

A perspective view on the nanomotion detection of living organisms and its features

Giovanni Dietler, Sandor Kasas, Anne-Céline Verenna Kohler, Giovanni Longo, Massimiliano Bertacchi, Petar Stupar, María Inés Villalba, Leonardo Venturelli

The insurgence of newly arising, rapidly developing health threats, such as drug-resistant bacteria and cancers, is one of the most urgent public-health issues of modern times. This menace calls for the development of sensitive and reliable diagnostic tool ...

WILEY2020

Reproducibility warning: The curious case of polyethylene glycol 6000 and spheroid cell culture

Francesco Stellacci, Quy Ong Khac, Zhi Luo, Ahmet Bekdemir

Reproducibility of results is essential for a well-designed and conducted experiment. Several reasons may originate failure in reproducing data, such as selective reporting, low statistical power, or poor analysis. In this study, we used PEG6000 samples fr ...

2020

The virtuous cycle of human genetics and mouse models in drug discovery

Johan Auwerx

Ongoing studies in many species seek to understand the origins, architecture and consequences of phenotypic variation under normal and dysfunctional conditions, with the aim of identifying targets for intervention that can prevent, stabilize or reverse dis ...

NATURE PUBLISHING GROUP2019

Integration of microfluidics and multimodal optics for translational bioanalytics

Daniel Migliozzi

Numerous analytical techniques for life sciences have been at the basis of the improvement of medical diagnostics and treatments. Current challenges in bioanalytics are related to the conception of methods enabling large amount of information to be extract ...

EPFL2019

Microfluidic and micromechanical in vivo studies of Caenorhabditis elegans

Roger Philippe Krenger

Caenorhabditis elegans is one of the most attractive model organisms in biomedical research for understanding human diseases and for drug testing at a whole-organism level, since many biological pathways and genes have been conserved between itself and hum ...

EPFL2019

Computational studies of industrial hosts for improved production of the 2nd generation of biofuels

Milenko Tokic

In an effort of overcoming the limited availability of fossil energy resources and moving toward a sustainable economy, the focus of the research and development in the area of biofuels has shifted towards developing the 2nd generation of fuels that should ...

EPFL2019