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Info DEE # 23 - December 2020
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Dear DEE,
Obviously, this has been a year full of unexpected events for all of us at the DEE. I realise that the shutdown period has been particularly challenging for most of you. Because we had to cancel the Christmas party, for obvious reasons, I would like to take this opportunity to thank all the DEE collaborators, even if I can’t do this in person. First, I would like to thank everyone in the department who helped in organising and maintaining a safe working environment during and after the shutdown. Second, I would like to thank those dedicated people who helped maintain the animals, plants, and microorganism culture collections that obviously had to be maintained all through the shutdown. Most of these people worked long hours completely alone in an almost empty building. Third, I know that many of you found it difficult to adapt to work-life from home. However, despite the home work, and with the dedication of the admin team, the team managed to maintain almost all administrative tasks, even if it was challenging at times. Thanks a lot to the admin team for this. I would also like to thank the assistants who have made a serious effort to maintain a more normal scientific life by organising the internal seminar series online, and Charles Mullon for organising the external seminar series online. For the administrator, Marlène, and for the Director, we have had to frequently change and adapt at the DEE to keep things running with ever-changing rules from UNIL and the Canton de Vaud. Thanks a lot for following these ever-changing regulations and also for all your many helpful suggestions during this period. Finally, I would like to give a special thanks to Marlène Petit for keeping the administration and organisation of the department running, even during times when the Swiss-French border was closed, and to Anne-Lyse Roulin for the enormous work she put in to organise the labs during the re-opening and subsequent phases.
I wish you all a very happy, and well-earned, Christmas holiday and New Year break and I look froward to seeing you all in 2021.
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WELCOME TO OUR NEW COLLEAGUES
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Dr Alexander Brandt joined the group of Prof. Tanja Schwander. Alexander is located in office 4304, phone 42.79.
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We are also glad to count on the help of a new student-assistant: Mr Jérémie Moulin (Bertelsmeier group). Welcome to him too.
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Congratulations to Prof. Marc Robinson-Rechavi (main beneficiary) and Prof. Robert Waterhouse (co-beneficiary) who have just obtained an SNF Sinergia grant. The overall goal of the project is to understand the evolution of arthropod life histories, by understanding how the mechanism of moulting and the diversity of moulting patterns have changed throughout arthropod evolutionary history. This will be done by building the MoultDB database, and by studying genomes, gene expression, and morphology of extant and fossil species in a wide diversity of arthropods. In addition to Marc Robinson-Rechavi and Robert Waterhouse, this project includes the groups of Alison Dalley (UNIL-FGSE) and Ariel Chipman (University of Jerusalem).
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Claudio Augugliaro, PhD student in the group of Prof. Philippe Christe in Mongolia, published a paper in Global Ecology and Conservation, entitled: Patterns of human interaction with snow leopard and co- predators in the Mongolian western Altai: Current issues and perspectives. See the UNIL press release.
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Camille-Sophie Cozzarolo, PhD student in the group of Prof. Philippe Christe, took advantage of the confinement period that prevent her from doing her field work in spring to publish a review in Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution entitled: Enhanced Attraction of Arthropod Vectors to Infected Vertebrates: A Review of Empirical Evidence.
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With colleagues from the Institute of Microbiology at the CHUV and the Museum of Zoology in Lausanne, Prof. Philippe Christe published in the journal Parasite the discovery of a new family of Chlamydia bacteria infecting ectoparasitic mites of mouse-eared bat species.
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On the right: Spinturnix myoti, an ectoparasite of bats.
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Dr Jialin Liu (former PhD Student at the DEE) and Prof. Marc Robinson-Rechavi have published a paper in Science Advances which provides robust evidence for adaptive evolution of gene regulation in human brain evolution, as first hypothesised by King & Wilson 1975. To do this, they have developed a new method to detect positive selection on regulatory sequences, combining machine learning and selection sign test.
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On the right, Fig. 4 Proportion of positive CTCF binding sites in different tissues or cell types.
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Dr Fanny Cavigliasso and other members of Kawecki group have published a paper in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, demonstrating experimental evolution of post-ingestive nutritional compensation. Using stable isotopes of nitrogen and carbon, they showed that Drosophila populations maintained on a nutrient-poor and highly imbalanced diet evolved improved efficiency in extracting the limiting nutrient (proteins) from their diet, combined with reduced assimilation of carbohydrates. Thus, evolution can partially compensate for imbalance in the diet, in particular when the overall nutrient availability is low.
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Student (Ellouène Charavel, First step 2019), PhD Students (Olivia Bates) and Postdoctoral fellows (Dr Jelena Buran, Dr Jérôme Gippet, Dr Hugo Darras) of the groups of Prof. Cleo Bertelsmeier and of Prof. Laurent Keller published together a paper in Journal of Animal Ecology. The authors show that a thermal niche shift toward cooler climates is accompanied by higher acclimation ability of thermal minima in the introduced ant species Tapinoma magnum. This study combines a quantitative niche shift analysis with lab experiments.
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Please remember, as communicated by the Direction of the University that wearing of a mask is mandatory in all buildings on campus, in all circumstances, including in your office. Do not forget to apply other protection measures, in particular social distancing and hand washing. We also count on you to register through the google doc when you want to access your office or some labs and facilities, including greenhouse.
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