Info DEE # 49 - April 2023

Mr Hugo Le Lay has joined the group of Prof. Bertelsmeier as an Intern. Hugo is located in office 3112, phone 41.94. Hugo.LeLay@unil.ch

Mr Arthur Weyna has joined the group of Prof. Lehmann as a Postdoctoral Researcher. Arthur is located in office 1116, phone 41.67. Arthur.Weyna@unil.ch

Ms. Rachel Harrison has joined the group of Prof. Van de Waal an External Scientific Collaborator. Rachel is located in office 2107.1, phone 42.75

Ms. Anne-Caroline Heintz has joined he group of Prof. Roulin as an Animal Keeper. Caroline is located in office 3206, phone 42.18

The Faculty of Biology and Medicine (FBM) at the University of Lausanne (UNIL) operates 12 state-of-the-art facilities that are continuously pushing the boundaries of knowledge in biomedical science by encouraging fundamental, translational and clinical research from the nano to the macro scale.

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«Énergie: ne pas prendre de décisions absurdes», par Bayron Schwyn
Interview d’Antoine Guisan
Lire l’article (contenu réservé aux abonnés du journal)

Paolo Becciu, Robin Séchaud, Kim Schalcher, Céline Plancherel and Alexandre Roulin have published an article in Scientific Reports entitled "Prospecting movements link phenotypic traits to female annual potential fitness in a nocturnal predator". Recent biologging technology reveals hidden life and breeding strategies of nocturnal animals. Combining animal movement patterns with individual characteristics and landscape features can uncover meaningful behaviours that directly influence fitness. Consequently, defining the proximate mechanisms and adaptive value of the identified behaviours is of paramount importance.

https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-023-32255-7

Together with colleagues from the Université Paris-Saclay, Prof. Waterhouse published the results of an investigation into how Drosophila immune cells respond to infections with Mycobacterium abscessus, a fast-growing mycobacterium and an opportunistic pathogen. Published in PLOS Pathogens, the study shows that infection induces expression of antimicrobial peptide-encoding genes, but it is the cellular response of immune blood cells, called haemocytes, that is critical for fly survival.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.ppat.1011257

Michel Chapuisat has published a dispatch on an unorthodox (and not very Catholic) mutation with major consequences in a clonal ant. Titled "Evolution: A social parasite was born from a virgin", check it out here or there.

Erica van de Waal and colleagues from the University of Neuchâtel published a paper entitled: 'Context‑dependent alarm responses in wild vervet monkeys' in the Journal of Animal Cognition. The alarm calls of nonhuman primates are occasionally cited as functionally equivalent to lexical word meaning in human language. Recently, however, it has become increasingly unlikely that one-to-one relations between alarm call structures and predator categories are the default, mainly because many call types are produced in multiple contexts, requiring morecomplex notions of meaning. For example, male vervet monkeys produce the same alarm calls during encounters with terrestrial predators and neighbouring groups, suggesting that recipients require additional information to attribute meaning tothe calls. The authors empirically tested the hypothesis that vervet monkeys take contextual information into account when responding to each other's alarm calls. In playback experiments, they exposed subjects to recordings of male alarm barks during actual intergroup encounters (predator unlikely) or when there was no intergroup encounter (predator likely). Subjects responded more strongly in the no intergroup encounter situations, typically associated with discovering a hiding predator.

Info DEE # 49 - April 2023

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