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Info DEE # 12 - December 2019
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MERRY CHRISTMAS AND HAPPY NEW YEAR
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It has been another very successful year for the DEE and as the end of the year approaches, we wish all of you at the DEE a very merry Christmas and a very happy, successful and productive 2020. See you all in 2020!
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WELCOME TO OUR NEW COLLEAGUES
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Prof. Alia Rodriguez-Villate is back at the DEE for one month and a half as visiting Scientist in the group of Prof. Ian Sanders. Alia will be located in office 4318, phone 42.61. Alia.Rodriguez@unil.ch. Welcome back Alia.
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Ms Sakshi Sharda joined the group of Prof. Tadeusz Kawecki in partnership with Dr Brian Hollis, as PhD Student. Sakshi is located in office 2107, phone 42.23. Sakshi.Sharda@unil.ch
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Dr Antonin Thiebaut joined the group of Prof. Robert Waterhouse as Postdoctoral fellow. Antonin is located in office 3212.1, phone 41.18. Antonin.Thiebaut@unil.ch
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EXTERNAL SEMINARS
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The next scheduled DEE seminar will be held on March 4th 2020. It will be the opportunity to hear Prof. Abderraham Khila of the Institute of Functional Genomics in Lyon. He will be hosted by Prof. Laurent Keller. Check regularly the DEE Seminar agenda. 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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Congratulations to Dr Yuko Ulrich who was awarded an SNF Eccellenza Professorial Fellowship for her project "Experimental Epidemiology in Ant Societies". Yuko and her team will be exploring how social organisation affects disease dynamics, using clonal ants as a model system. Check ulrichlab.com for more information and upcoming open positions.
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Photo: © Alex Wild.
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This year saw the launch of the new funding scheme of the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) called SPARK. The is the first funding scheme from the SNSF that allows postdoctoral researchers, as well as group leaders, to apply for research funds. Out of about 700 applicants, two projects from DEE were funded; one by Anurag Chaturvedi and Soon-Jae Lee and the other by Romain Pigeault. Congratulations to the three of them on their success:
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The SPARK project lead by Dr Romain Pigeault is entilted: Histamine-mediated signalling: a new pharmaceutical target to control malaria relapses? You can find a summary of the project here.
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The SPARK project lead by Dr Anurag Chaturvedi and Dr Soon-Jae Lee is entitled: Impact of m6A regulation on arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi and their symbiosis with plants. You can find a summary of the project here.
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Prof. Marc Robinson-Rechavi was interviewed by the RTS about legal obligations in favor of open access publications and consequences in terms of science diffusion. The interview is available here.
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In the radio show CQFD, Dr Olivier Glaizot, explains how the collections of the Museum of Zoology, originally intended to be presented to the public, preserve DNA samples for current and future scientists.
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You can here this CQFD show here.
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Following the publication of her book, "The secret wars of ants" (Editions Favre), Prof. Cleo Bertelsmeier was interviewed by the radio show CQFD and by the Swiss journal Le Temps.
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Prof. Philippe Christe was interviewed by the Swiss journal Le Temps about the social connections existing among vampire bats.
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The journal 24 Heures reports on the Opération Fourmis launched in April 2019. In total, 568 collectors played the game, sending 6542 ants by post through tubes.
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Prof. Antoine Guisan and former Postdoctoral fellows, Dr Heidi Mod, Dr Daniel Scherrer, Dr Manuela D'Amen, as well as Prof. Jake Alexander, published an article in Global Ecology and Biogeography. In this article, many pieces of evidence show that omitting intraspecific trait variation can hinder the proper inference of niche-trait relationships and our capacity to identify species' ecological assembly rules (EARs). This could in turn affect our capacity to spatially predict functional properties of communities. They conclude that large surveys sampling both niche and trait measurements at the same scales should be conducted along wide environmental gradients.
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Legend: Illustration of the measurement levels of species' environmental conditions (niche) and functional traits in a simplified situation with maximum three species (here plants) sampled in three plots (a, b, c) along one or two environmental gradients Env. 1 and Env. 2
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The article is entitled: Large-scale versus small-scale agriculture: Disentangling the relative effects of the farming system and semi-natural habitats on birds' habitat preferences in the Ethiopian highlands.
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Photo: Field site.
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A study led by Dr Andrea Romano of the Prof. Roulin lab has shown convergent evolution of relative bill size according to climatic and geographic factors, thus suggesting a possible role of the bill as a heat‐exchange surface in nocturnal raptors. It was published in Global Ecology and Biogeography.
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Dr Darren J. Parker, Dr Jens Bast, Kirsten Jalvingh and Zoé Dumas with Prof. Marc Robinson-Rechavi and Prof. Tanja Schwander have just published an article in Nature Communications showing that sex-biased gene expression is repeatedly masculinized in asexual stick insects.
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Figure legend: Phylogeny of Timema stick insects showing asexual species in blue and sexual species in red.
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With colleagues from the University of Geneva, Prof. Robert Waterhouse published in the journal Genome Biology and Evolution, the 1.2 Gbp draft genome and comparative genomics of the dipluran two-pronged bristletail Campodea augens. This cute critter has the largest chemosensory gene repertoire of ionotropic receptors in the animal kingdom, which might compensate for the fact that it is blind. Along with collembolans (springtails) and proturans (coneheads), the diplurans represent key outgroup species for studying the emergence of genomic innovations in insects.
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We thank our Lab Technicians team for all the support provided all along the year in maintaining the labs in an appropriate shape and working environment and for the work recently done with freezers. Their work makes your work possible, so we remind to all lab users to respect the rules of security and good practices in the labs.
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The intranet was updated with the Code of Conduct for External and Internal Seminars. Visit the Intranet to know more.
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