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Info DEE # 35 - January 2021
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A WARM WELCOME TO OUR NEW COLLEAGUES
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Mr Dany Buffat has joined the group of Prof. Keller as Researcher. Dany is located in office 3209.1, phone 42.07. Dany.Buffat@unil.ch
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Ms Llilians Calvo Gonzalez has joined the group of Prof. Keller as a Post Doctoral Researcher. Llilians is located in office 2101, phone 41.76. Llilians.CalvoGonzalez@unil.ch
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Mr Marco Fele has joined the group of Prof. Mullon as an Intern. Marco is located in office 4305, phone 41.69.
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Mr Vincent Merel has joined the group of Prof. Schwander as a Postdoctoral Researcher. Vincent is located in office 4305, phone 41.69. Vincent.Merel@unil.ch
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Mr Matt Olson has joined the group of Prof. Pannell as a visiting Scientific Collaborator. Matt is located in office 4319, phone 42.47.
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Mr Thomas Panchard has joined the group of Prof. Guisan as a Research Associate. Thomas is located in office 4301, phone 42.68. Thomas.Panchard@unil.ch
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Ms Fuyuan Qiu has joined the group of Prof. Robinson-Rechavi as a visiting Scientific Collaborator. She will be studying comparative transcriptomics of nuptial pads in Anura. Fuyuan is located in office 3206.1, phone 42.06. Fuyuan.Qiu@unil.ch
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Ms Alia Rodriguez Villate has joined the group of Prof. Sanders as a visiting Scientific Collaborator. Alia is located in office 4318, phone 42.61. Alia.Rodriguez@unil.ch. Welcome back Alia.
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With the current health situation and restrictions, decisions will be made as to whether DEE External Seminars will continue being organized as hybrid events or will become online only. As the situation evolves and information becomes available, any changes to the seminar format will be duly communicated.
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HIGHLIGHTS
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Giulia Zancolli obtained a SNSF COST grant entitled "Pioneering a new field of research: venom evo-devo" This will be a flagship project fort the EUVEN (European Venom Network) COST Action CA19144 in which Giulia is a member of the management committee and country representative for Switzerland. In this project, she will investigate the mechanisms underlying the morphogenesis of the venom apparatus, using the common house spider, Parasteatoda tepidariorum, as a model system. By combining 3D high-definition morphological reconstructions and spatiotemporal analysis of gene expression dynamics at single-cell resolution, this project will reveal, for the first time, the key players involved in the emergence and differentiation of a complex, centralized venom system.
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Did you know that whales teach each other songs? And that vervet monkeys don't all eat the same thing depending on which group they belong to, even if they share the same environment? Erica van de Waal tells RTS show "Micro Sciences" more about how culture manifests itself in some animals.
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Giulia Perroud, Grégory Brazzola and Claus Wedekind were featured in a segment on whitefish for SFR Schweiz Aktuell (12.01.21).
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Cleo Bertelsmeier was featured in an article in the NZZ am Sonntag entitiled Das geheime Leben der Ameisen – wie sie Nebenbuhler austricksen und Schlachten gewinnen (The secret life of ants - how they outwit rivals and win battles)
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PhD student Livio Ruzzante, together with other members of the Waterhouse group, published his work on understanding the relationships between gene evolutionary histories and their functional roles, focusing on the insect immune system. The study, published in Molecular Biology and Evolution, develops a suite of metrics that capture different features of gene evolutionary histories through multi-species comparisons, and uses these to define evolutionary similarities amongst different immune gene families. These profiles are then examined in the context of the putative functional roles of different immune genes based on knowledge of the immune system framework and with respect to gene expression data. The results suggest that where and how genes participate in immune responses limit the range of possible evolutionary scenarios they exhibit. Using insect immunity as a test-case study system highlights the potential of applying comparative genomics approaches to characterise how functional constraints on different components of biological systems govern their evolutionary trajectories.
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Giulia Zancolli, along with Marc Robison-Rechavi, Rob Waterhouse and Maarten Reijnders published a paper in PNAS entitled "Convergent evolution of venom gland transcriptomes across Metazoa". In this work, they compare venom gland transcriptomes from 20 venomous species spanning the main Metazoan lineages, to test whether different animals have independently adopted similar molecular mechanisms to perform the same function. Surprisingly, they found that the venom glands of different animal lineages had similar global gene expression patterns. Notably, groups of genes involved in protein secretion, and especially stress response pathways, had similar expression levels, revealing that many animals have come up with the same solution independently. On the other hand, signalling and regulatory networks had lineage specific patterns, suggesting that the way in which cells are regulated and communicate might reflect the diverse developmental origins of venom systems. The paper was featured in the SIB press release, on Bluewin, the 24 Heures print and the RTS CQFD segment.
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An international team led by the Fumagalli and Christe research groups, including PhD students Eduard Mas-Carrió, Judith Schneider and Claudio Augugliaro, as well as Olivier Glaizot from the Musée cantonal de Zoologie, have published a paper in the journal Environmental DNA showing that camera traps and environmental DNA analysis are two complementary approaches when studying the distribution of the terrestrial fauna in remote desert areas. The team compared camera trap and eDNA methodologies, with a focus on vertebrate terrestrial taxa in two extreme desert ecosystems, the Trans-Altai Gobi in Mongolia and the Kalahari Desert in Botswana. Images and water samples were collected in some of the rare and scattered water bodies found in these areas, where animals must gather to drink. Based on camera trap data, the results show that the detectability of species by eDNA analysis depends on several parameters such as the time between the collection of water and the last time the species gather to drink, the total number of visits to the waterholes or the body size. The results provide useful indications how best to use the potential of the eDNA methodology and to complement the two approaches, and offer many developments for the efficient monitoring of threatened animal populations in remote and arid environments.
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Photo: P. Christe
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Prof. Robert Waterhouse, together with colleagues representing a diverse cross-section of researchers implicated in European biodiversity informatics, released a preprint Opinion Article at F1000Research on recommendations for connecting molecular sequence and biodiversity research infrastructures through ELIXIR. As a developer of services and technical solutions that help integrate and coordinate life science resources across Europe, ELIXIR wants to foster discussion on these important issues. The report details example use cases to highlight how DNA sequencing offers the means to catalogue, explore, and monitor the richness and biogeography of life on Earth, along with examples of national biodiversity programmes that together show where progress is being made but also highlight common challenges and opportunities. The report is open for comment on the F1000Research platform, aiming to encourage strategic thinking and longer-term planning to ensure that sequencing data can deliver their full potential and help advance global efforts to prevent further decline of Earth’s biodiversity.
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While you are encouraged to place your publications into Serval, please make sure that your PI has validated the deposition first. Not all documents should be included in Serval, and they are complicated to remove.
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