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Info DEE # 18 - July 2020
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WELCOME TO OUR NEW COLLEAGUES
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Dr Hugo Cayuela joined the group of Prof. Claus Wedekind as Postdoctoral fellow. Hugo is located in office 3223, phone 42.49. Hugo.Cayuela@unil.ch
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Ms Thea Chevalley joined the group of Prof. Alexandre Roulin for an intership of a few weeks. Thea.Chevalley@unil.ch
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Ms Julie Schafer joined the group of Prof. Alexandre Roulin for an intership of a few weeks. Julie.Schafer@unil.ch
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Dr William Toubiaba joined the group of Prof. Tanja Schwander as Postdoctoral fellow. William is located in office 3221, phone 42.45. William.Toubiana@unil.ch
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We are also glad to count on the help of new student-assistants: Ms Nora Corthesy (Pannell group), Mr Prosper Ougier (Pannell group), Ms Apiha Shanmuganathan (Pannell group). Welcome to them too.
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External Seminars are still suspended at the moment. Some internal seminars are maintained through videoconference. In case of question about External seminars, please contact Prof. Charles Mullon. In case of questions about Internal seminars, please contact Tane Kafle and Olivia Bates.
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HIGHLIGHTS
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Warm congratulations to our lab technician Apprentice, Mathilde Arlettaz, who obtained her CFC with excellent marks and a CVCI prize for the best average marks during the 3 years of her apprenticeship at the DEE. Congratulations too and thanks to Christine La Mendola, who organized Mathilde's work all along her training.
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Prof. Cleo Bertelsmeier was interviewed by the RTS on June 30th to talk about "Political ants" and explains why it can be unfruitful to compare human and ants societies. You can hear the interview here.
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Alpha females dominating among a group, that's possible, in particular when the number of males is higher than females. That's the conclusion of a study led by Prof. Erica van de Waal and her team in South Africa and explained in an interview on a RTS radio show.
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Congratulations to Prof. Erica van de Waal who obtained a grant from the Foundation Branco Weiss, in partnership with her colleague Marco Hutter from ETHZ, to study interactions between Vervet monkeys and a robot ANYmal.
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In the frame of the Opération Fourmis, Prof. Tanja Schwander and Guillaume Lavanchy (PhD Student) were both interviewed in the RTS 12:45 (see 13:14 to 15:32).
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In the frame of a study predicting beetle population dynamics in Italy's Gran Paradiso National Park (Jonathan Giezendanner, EPFL), Prof. Jérôme Goudet was interviewed by the RTS show CQFD to explain the concepts of metapopulation and genes flow.
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Dr Yuko Ulrich will leave the DEE at the end of the months with her PhD Student, Giacomo Alciatore, to pursue her academic career at the ETH Zurich. Unfortunately, due to the circumstances, aperos are not authorized these days. Still we wish Yuko and Giacomo the best in Zurich and hope to meet them again either in Lausanne or in Zurich.
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Prof. Laurent Keller contributed to a paper in Artificial life showing how artificial organisms evolving in computational environments can shed light on evolutionary processes. The article is a crowd-sourced product of researchers in the fields of artificial life and evolutionary computation who have provided first-hand accounts of such cases. The paper presents evidence that the existence and importance of evolutionary surprises extends beyond the natural world, and may indeed be a universal property of all complex evolving systems.
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What are the effects of glyphosate on different life-history traits and the ability to transmit avian malaria for the mosquito Culex pipiens? A part of the master (2019-2020) of Danaé Bataillard with Dr Romain Pigeault and Prof. Philippe Christe is now published in Ecology & Evolution: Impact of field-realistic doses of glyphosate and nutritional stress on mosquito life history traits and susceptibility to malaria parasite infection.
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In vector-borne diseases, what are the consequences of different spatial parasite distribution within vertebrate hosts for their transmission to the vectors ? In both humans and birds, Dr Romain Pigeault, Julie Isaïa and Prof. Philippe Christe found that the parasite densities differed depending on which side of the body the sample was taken, suggesting that Plasmodium parasites are not homogeneously distributed within the vertebrate host. This might have important consequences on the epidemiology of the disease since they show that this variation influences host-to-mosquito transmission. This study was published in collaboration with the researchers from the "Institut de Recherche en Sciences de la Santé, Bobo-Dioulasso, Burkina Faso » and the "Unité MIVEGEC, IRD 224-CNRS 5290-Université Montpellier » in Scientific reports.
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In an article published in PNAS, Prof. Michel Chapuisat and former members of his team (Dr Amaury Avril, Sébastien Béniguel and Dr Jessica Purcell) report a fascinating discovery – a supergene that controls social organization in ants distorts the laws of Mendelian segregation. A series of observations and experiments congruently document that the supergene favours its own transmission by killing half of the offspring from heterozygous mothers. This is a demonstration of maternal effect killing by a supergene. Strikingly, selfish drive by the supergene favours the spread of a cooperative form of social organization whereby multiple queens share the same colony.
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This publication was advertized in a UNIL Press release that you can see here.
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How can species evolve in a sympatric setting? Tane Kafle (PhD student, Arguello Group) and his colleagues at Imperial College London have published, in Phil Trans B, their research (Tane's master work) on the evolution of reproductive barriers between two Mountain Rose species. These tree species appear to have speciated on Lord Howe Island, a tiny remote island off the coast of Eastern Australia. The study looks at signals of selection across the genomes of both species, and also investigates flowering time differences between the two species.
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We thank you and count on you all to continue the efforts with booking the google docs for the labs and office occupancy, mask wearing, desinfection of material and hands, observance of social distancing, due to the (still) pandemic situation. As you have probably all heard, precautions are more important than ever to avoid a second wave. See the guidelines of the FBM and take care.
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