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Info DEE # 13 - January 2020
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WELCOME TO OUR NEW COLLEAGUES
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Dr Jonas Bylemans joined the group of Prof. Claus Wedekind as Postdoctoral fellow. Jonas is located in office 3223, phone 42.49. Jonas.Bylemans@unil.
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Ms Blanche Dekeyzer joined the group of Prof. Robert Waterhouse for an internship of 5 months. Blanche is located in office 3212.1, phone 41.18. blanche.dekeyzer@ens-lyon.fr.
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Mr Hugo Fau joined the group of Prof. Erica van de waal for an internship of 5 months. Hugo is located in office 2205.1, phone 42.75.
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The DEE is very happy to welcome back Charles Mullon as SNSF assistant Professor. He will work with his team on the role of Eco-Evolutionary Dynamics and Genomic Evolution in trait variation. Prof. Mullon is located in room 4309, phone 42.70. Charles.Mullon@unil.ch.
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We are also glad to count on the help of new student-assistants: Mr Axel Aubert, Ms Angela Ruiz de Paz.
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Please check the DEE Seminar agenda to know more about our next invited Speakers. We remind that you can find on our Intranet (DEE day to day life > Seminars) the guidelines for hosting external seminar speakers and for organizing the pizza lunch.
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HIGHLIGHTS
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Congratulations to Prof. Tanja Schwander who was awarded the prestigious and highly competitive ERC consolidator grant for her project on Evolutionary consequences of arrested genomic conflict in asexual species.
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The Swiss Confederation has decided to fund a new National Centre of Competence in Research (NCCR) dedicated to the study of microbiomes. The NCCR will be created in 2020, comprises about 20 different research groups and will be headed by Prof. Jan Roelof van der Meer (DMF), with UNIL and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich as joint leading houses. The laboratories of Prof. Tadeusz J. Kawecki and of Prof. Ian Sanders are two partners of the Microbiomes NCCR. The project in the Sanders group will focus on "how the responsiveness of crops to inoculation with mycorrhizal fungi is mediated by the soil microbiome". The project in the Kawecki group uses Drosophila and its microbiota to study conditions under which commensal microbes evolve to be more benefecial to the host.. See the UNIL press release here.
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Congratulations to Prof. Cleo Bertelsmeier who was awarded by the Sandoz Family Foundation for her research and teaching activities at the DEE. This support will help to strengthen ecological research and teaching in the DEE and the Faculty of Biology and Medicine.
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Prof. Erica van de Waal was interviwed by the RTS about Vervet Monkeys and what they may teach us in terms of social behaviours, cultural transmission and females status. You can here the interview here.
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Continuous pollution by estrogens is more likely to have caused rapid evolution in river-dwelling than in lake dwelling fish. Dr Lucas Marques da Cunha, Diane Maitre (MSc BEC) and Prof. Claus Wedekind tested a river-dwelling grayling population and found the comparatively low toxicity and the low additive genetic variance in stress tolerance that is consistent with evolution induced by the pill revolution in the 1960s. The article was published in BMC Evol. Biol. (Dec 2019).
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A collaboration (National Stud, UNIBE, UNIL) co-supervised by Prof. Claus Wedekind recently established that MHC-linked social signalling influences female fertility in horses (Burger et al. Proc. R. Soc. B, 2017), but it remained unclear whether the selection happened in the oviduct or in the uterus. Follow-up experiments now suggest that these maternal strategies affect embryo survival mainly during the time of embryonic fixation in the uterus (Jeannerat et al. Scientific Reports 2020; with former MSc BEC student Selina Thomas).
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https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-58056-w
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Former DEE post-docs Alan Brelsford and Jessica Purcell, with former and current members of the Chapuisat team, Amaury Avril, Patrick Tran Van, Timothée Brütsch and Prof. Michel Chapuisat, have just published an article on supergene evolution in the journal Current Biology. Using a comparative genomics approach, they delve into the evolutionary history of a supergene that controls colony social organization in the Alpine silver ant. They show that this supergene is conserved across five divergent Formica lineages separated by 20-40 MY of evolution, which makes it the most ancient autosomal supergene yet described. Although the supergene itself is very large and spans hundreds of genes in all examined species, only very small disjunct regions distributed across the supergene harbored conserved trans-species fixed differences associated with alternative social organization. This unusual pattern suggests that the supergene has been shaped by a history of rare recombination or gene conversion, leaving small islands of divergence that contain candidate genes for alternative social organization.
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The Waterhouse Group released updates of 20 Anopheles mosquito genome assemblies using evolution to guide assembly improvements, published in BMC Biology. They applied and compared three independently developed bioinformatics methods that identify conserved gene arrangements in different species and use these to order and orient scaffolds to improve currently fragmented draft assemblies.
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