|
|
|
|
Info DEE # 38 - April 2022
|
|
|
|
|
A WARM WELCOME TO OUR NEW COLLEAGUES
|
|
|
|
|
|
Mr Matthieu De Lamarre has joined the group of Prof. Chapuisat as a Graduate Assistant. Matthieu is located in office 3119, phone 41.62. Matthieu.DeLamarre@unil.ch
|
|
|
Ms Lauriane Müller has joined the group of Prof. Roulin as a Research Collaborator. Ewan is located in office 3201, phone 41.74. Lauriane.Muller@unil.ch
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Mr Ian Quintas has joined the group of Prof. Wedekind as an Intern. Ian is located in office 3223, phone 42.49. Ian.Quintas@unil.ch
|
|
Ms Ting Shen has joined the group of Prof. Guisan a Guest Researcher. Ting is located in office 4304, phone 42.79.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Please also welcome our student assistants : Ms Esma BOUDEMAGH, Mr Anthony DUTRUY, Ms Flore MICHEL, Ms Elodie MOREL (group PANNELL).
|
|
|
|
|
|
EXTERNAL SEMINARS
|
|
Please note that External Seminars will now be
|
|
live-streamed through the REC UNIL platform.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Robert Waterhouse has been elected to the Board of Directors of the SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics. As one of the two SIB Group Leaders on the Board, he will represent the interests of the Swiss bioinformatics community of some 800 scientists, encouraging collaboration and knowledge sharing, and cooperation with national and international institutions on bioinformatics research and infrastructure.
|
|
|
|
The SNF-funded project of Claus Wedekind and colleagues is summarised in an article entitled The Human Factor on Natural Selection in the spring issue of EU Research Magazine.
|
|
|
|
The article Inferring positive selection on enhancers reveals a regulatory basis for the developmental hourglass model by Jialin Liu et al (Robinson-Rechavi group) has been selected as a SIB Remarkable Output of 2021.
|
|
What the committee said about the work: "This work elegantly shows the utility of a novel method to detect positive selection in non-coding DNA regions, and applying it to better understand the hourglass pattern of animal evolution."
|
|
|
|
Registration is open for the conference Mathematical and computational evolutionary biology MCEB, which will be in Chateau d'Oex nearby this June. The conference is co-organised by UNIL researchers from DEE and DBC this year.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Jelena Bujan, Sébastien Ollier and Cleo Bertelsmeier have published a study on thermoregulatory traits and climatic niches in Cataglyphis ants in collaboration with Spanish and French researchers.
|
Bujan, J., Ollier, S., Villalta, I., Devers, S., Cerdà, X., Amor, F., Dahbi, A., Bertelsmeier, C.*, Boulay, R.* (2022) Can thermoregulatory traits and evolutionary history predict climatic niches of thermal specialists? Diversity and Distributions, http://doi.org/10.1111/ddi.13511,
|
*equal contribution
Summary:
Predictions of future species distributions rest on the assumption that climatic conditions in the current range reflect fundamental niche requirements. Here, we measured heat tolerance, chill coma recovery, body size and phylogenetic relationships in 19 desert specialist ants in the genus Cataglyphis to test if theseimportant determinants of fundamental niches are good predictors of species realized niches. We modelled species climatic niches using 19 bioclimatic variables from WorldClim for recorded occurrence of each species. None of the determinants of the species' fundamental niche were linked to their realized climatic niche, modelled using species distribution models. However, both heat tolerance and chill coma recovery were highly correlated with body size andall three thermoregulatory traits were phylogenetically constrained, suggesting they reflect fundamental requirements of each species.Thes results challenge the basic assumption of climatic niche modelling, that the realized niche can be used as a proxy for determining fundamental nicherequirements. These findings are particularly concerning for studies that use the species’ current realized niche to predict their responses to climate change.
|
|
|
|
In a Current Opinion in Insect Science Special Issue on Insect Genomics, Romain Feron and Robert Waterhouse published a review on how advances in sequencing and assembly technologies are supporting the emergence of new genome-enabled model systems for studying a large variety of biological phenomena. They use insect genome assembly quality data from Romain’s Arthropoda Assembly Assessment Catalogue(A3Cat) published in GigaScience earlier this year, and present examples of recent high-quality genomics resources that are supporting the use of new species or groups of species to develop and expand emerging model systems that help advance understanding of insect biology and evolution.
|
|
|
|
Erica van de Waal led a research with colleagues from the Universities of Neuchâtel and Jerusalem just published in the journal Philosophical Transactions B, investigating the drivers and outcomes of between-group conflict in vervet monkeys. Neighbouring groups compete over access to resources and territories in between-group encounters, which can escalate into between-group conflicts (BGCs). Both the ecological characteristics of a territory and the rival’s fighting ability shape the occurrence and outcome of such contests. What remains poorly understood, however, is how seasonal variability in the ecological value of a territory together with fighting ability related to the likelihood of between-group encounters and the extent to which these escalate into conflicts. To test this, the researchers observed and followed four vervet monkey groups in the wild, and recorded the group structure (i.e. size, composition), the locations and the outcomes of 515 BGCs. They then assessed key ecological measures at these locations, such as vegetation availability (estimated from Copernicus Sentinel 2 satellite images) and the intensity of usage of these locations. They tested to what extent these factors together influenced the occurrence and outcomes of BGCs. They found that the occurrence of BGCs increased at locations with higher vegetation availability relative to the annual vegetation availability within the group’s home territory. Also, groups engaging in a BGC at locations far away from their home territory were less likely to win a BGC. Regarding group structure, they found that smaller groups systematically won BGCs against larger groups, which can be explained by potentially higher rates of individual free-riding occurring in larger groups. This study sheds light on how the ecology of encounter locations in combination with a group’s social characteristics can critically impact the dynamics of BGCs in a non-human primate species.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
While you are encouraged to place your publications into Serval, please make sure that your PI has validated the deposition first. Not all documents should be included in Serval, and they are complicated to remove.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
