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Info DEE # 26 - April 2021
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WELCOME TO OUR NEW COLLEAGUES
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Ms Danaé Bataillard joined the group of Prof. John Pannell as labtechnician. Danaé is (will be) located in office 4319 phone 42.47. Danae.Bataillard@unil.ch
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Ms Carla Campon joined the group of Prof. Alexandre Roulin for an internship of a couple of month. Carla is located in office 3201, phone 41.74. Carla.Campon@unil.ch
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Dr Jaime Gonzalez joined the group of Prof. Tadeusz Kawecki as Postdoctoral fellow in the frame of the NCCR Microbiome. Jaime is (will be) located in office 2107.2, phone 42.55. Jaime.Gonzalez@unil.ch
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Ms Gaëlle Lanté joined the group of Prof. Erica van de Waal for an internship of a couple of months. Gaëlle is located in office 2107.1, phone 42.75. Gaelle.Lante@unil.ch
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Ms Lucy Novovitch is back at the DEE for an other internship in the lab of Prof. Claus Wedekind. Lucy is located in office 3222, phone 42.48. Lucy.Novovitch@unil.ch
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Ms Soledad Santillan joined the group of Prof. Philippe Christe for an internship of a few months through the MEME exchange program. Soledad is located in office 3209.1, phone 42.07.
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Mr Valentin Verdon joined the group of Prof. Antoine Guisan as PhD Student. Valentin is (will be) located in office 4301.1, phone 42.69 Valentin.Verdon@unil.ch
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We are also glad to count on the help of new students-assistants: Ms Victoire D'Amico (animal house), Mr Sacha Levivier (Pannell group), Ms Astrid Anaï Oliva de Leon (Schwander group), Ms Cassandra Wicht (Pannell group). Welcome to them too.
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Congratulations to Prof. Antoine Guisan who has been designated by Reuters as one of the 1'000 world’s top climate scientists. Antoine Guisan is listed at # 119. You can find the detailed information about the ranking here.
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Prof. Cleo Bertelsmeier was invited by the RTS to the Dicodeurs comic radio show where they have talked (and laught) about ants and many other things.
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Prof. van de Waal contributed to the new virtual lab 6x15 with the Grange de Dorigny. A virtual lab between art and science. Also see the UNIL news published about this experience.
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Prof. Philippe Christe was interviewed in Le Temps, where he shares his best memories as a researcher and biologist and some links between research, environment and the current pandemic.
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Congratulations to Prof. Laurent Keller who has just obtained a new SNF grant.
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The aim of the project is to use the longhorn crazy ant Paratrechina longicornis to study the evolution of sexual antagonism. This species is unusual because it has evolved a double-clonal genetic system whereby all queens are clonally-produced from their mother, all males are clonally-produced from their father and workers are sexually-produced. This system provides an exceptional natural experimental setup for testing the genomic outcomes of antagonism because genes are transmitted only between individuals of the same sex and there is effectively no more gene flow between the male and female lineages as workers are completely sterile in this species. Hence, the genomes of queens and males no longer recombine and evolve as separate entities similar to sex chromosomes. Both caste and sexual antagonistic selection are expected to be relaxed in this system as phenotypic traits can be optimized independently in each sex. We will employ comparative evolutionary genomic approaches to uncover changes in patterns of molecular evolution following the emergence of this remarkable system.
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Congratulations to Prof. Roman Arguello
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who was awarded an SNF Project Grant titled Molecular and Cellular Evolution of Sensory Organs. He will be using these funds to investigate the evolution and development of cell type changes that underlie the diversification of sensory organs among ecologically diverse Drosophila species. The project will combine bulk RNA-seq and single cell "omic" approaches to identify factors that are responsible for sensory perception evolution and differences in behavioral responses.
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Tane Kafle, a PhD student in the Arguello group, was awarded a travel grant from The Company of Biologists. Tane will be using the funds to collect Drosophila species in Japan within a region that is suspected to be a hybrid zone between two species that he studies. These collections will be used to generate population genomic samples that will refine the split between the species, test the hypothesis that they hybridize, and to quantify the amount genetic introgression that has occurred
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Current and former members of the group of Prof. Antoine Guisan published an article in Nature Communications.
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The article aims to show that distance to native climatic niche margins explains establishement success of alien mammals. You can also read the "Actualité" published by UNIL about this article.
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Prof. Antoine Guisan collaborated in a collective article from the CIRM published in Mountain Research and Development. This article aims to show how Research Centers could better desing cross and transdisciplinarity research about mountain. You can read here the news published by UNIL.
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Prof. Cleo Bertelsmeier and Dr Jérôme Gippet published together an article in PNAS. The global pet trade may accelerate the spread of invasive species around the world, which threatens native biodiversity and impacts human economy and health. Here, using an extensive metaanalysis, we show that invasive species are strongly overrepresented across mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, and fish traded as pets. Even in the emergent trade of ants as pets, which is too recent to be responsible for any invasions yet, we found an overrepresentation of invasive species. This indicates that the pet trade not only creates opportunities for invasions, but that it favors specifically invasive species. These findings call for the rapid implementation of strict international regulations of the trade in animals as pets.
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You can also read the UNIL news about the article and the numerous press release around the publication, International:
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A new paper in Molecular Biology and Evolution from the Kawecki group analyses the genomic basis of adaptation to poor larval diet in Drosophila. A combination of genome sequence and gene expression data revealed extensive changes in lipid and carbohydrate metabolism and hormonal signaling. Unexpectedly, those changes appear to mediate a trade-off between tolerance to chronic nutrient shortage and resistance to acute starvation.
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Prof. Roman Arguello, in collaboration with group members from Prof. Richard Benton’s lab at UNIL's CIG, published a paper in eLife titled: Targeted molecular profiling of rare olfactory sensory neurons identifies fate, wiring, and functional determinants. In this work they implemented a transgenic approach (called Targeted DamID, or TaDa) to quantify genes that are differentially expressed between single olfactory neuron populations in Drosophila's antenna. These neuron populations are particularly hard to profile due to how few and small they are. They demonstrated that the TaDa approach was sufficiently sensitive for gaining access to these cells, and identified gene expression profiles specific to each neuron class. They went on to carry out developmental studies on the top two differentially expressed factors: a transcription factor (Pdm3), and a cadherin protein (Flamingo). These experiments demonstrated a novel role as a genetic switch of neuron fate for Pdm3, and a role in proper neuron segregation during olfactory system development for Flamingo.
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Romain Feron of the Waterhouse Group and Dr. Qiaowei Pan of the Keller Group published in Molecular Ecology Resources a computational analysis workflow designed to facilitate studying the genetic basis of sex determination using RAD‐Seq data. RADSex is easy to use, requires few computational resources, makes no prior assumptions about the type of sex‐determination system or structure of the sex locus, and offers convenient visualisation through a dedicated R package.
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As part of the international i5k consortium, Prof. Robert Waterhouse published in BMC Biology the sequencing and analysis of the genome of the stable fly, Stomoxys calcitrans. This fly “is a major blood-feeding pest of livestock that has near worldwide distribution, causing an annual cost of over $2 billion for control and product loss in the USA alone”. The genomic resources produced and preliminary insights into potential mechanisms underlying reproduction, host interactions, and novel targets for pest control, provide important leads for expanding the available toolset for controlling stable fly infestations.
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Photo: Wikimedia commons
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Dr Maarten Rreijnders of the Waterhouse Group published in Frontiers in Bioinformatics, his open-source Python software for producing user-customisable semantic similarity scatterplots of redundancy-reduced Gene Ontology (GO) term lists. GO-Figure! offers a simple solution for command-line plotting of informative summary visualisations of lists of GO terms, designed to support exploratory data analyses and dataset comparisons. If you are staring at lists of GO terms from your enrichment analyses then why not try it out from GitLab!
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Dr Giulia Zancolli, (Marie-Curie Fellow in the Robinson-Rechavi Group), published a paper entitled The new COST Action European Venom Network (EUVEN)—synergy and future perspectives of modern venomics. In this paper, Dr Giulia Zancolli and colleagues summarise the goals and the tools of the new COST Action "European Venom Network (EUVEN)". This COST Action was recently launched to promote synergistic interactions among different stakeholders and foster venom research at the European level. Venom research is a highly multidisciplinary field that involves multiple subfields of biology, informatics, pharmacology, medicine, and other areas. Dr Giulia Zancolli is representative member for Switzerland and co-leader of the working group (WG4) "Web Resources" of this COST Action.
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In order to support employees who travel outside of Switzerland for their professional activities, UNIL now offers travel insurance as well as medical, security and logistical assistance worldwide, coordinated by International SOS (ISOS). UNIL staff on business trips have access to ISOS assistance services. Do not hesitate to contact the secretary of your group for more information, including the UNIL member reference, and to prepare your trip as safely as possible. You will also received from the HR Department in the following weeks, your ISOS card member.
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The DEE Laboratory Handbook have been up-dated. You can access it throught the DEE INTRANET or you can download it here. Many thanks to Loriane and Christine who did a very detailed and clear documentation that will be useful to all lab and equipement users, whatever they are other lab technicians, PhD students, Postdocs or Master Students supervised at the DEE. Please take the time to downlaod it and to refer to it when you need an information linked to lab work or machines and devices.
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