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Info DEE # 16 - May 2020

WELCOME TO OUR NEW COLLEAGUES

Ms Christabel Bucao joined the group of Prof. Marc Robinson Rechavi as PhD Student in the frame of the Quantitative Biology Doctoral Program. Christabel is located in office 3214, phone 4204. ChristabelFloi.Bucao@unil.ch

Mr Daniel Guignard joined the group of Prof. Laurent Keller for a couple of Months as Lab technician. Daniel is located in office 2105, phone 41.86. Daniel.Guignard@unil.ch

Dr Erica McGale joined the group of Professor Ian Sanders as Postdoctoral fellow. Erica is located in office 4318.1, phone 42.77. Erica.McGale@unil.ch

We are also glad to count on the help of a new student-assistants: Mr Benoit Sommervogel, in the group of Professor John Pannell.

EXTERNAL SEMINARS

During the shutdown of the University, external Seminars are suspended.

The responsibles for internal Seminars are working on technical solutions in order to maintain remote internal Seminars during.

HIGHLIGHTS

The organisation of ant communities is such that these insects are able to set up a kind of containment in the event of a disease outbreak. Researchers have just discovered that while ensuring the security of their society, they also protect all biodiversity. Thierry Dutoit from the french CNRS and Prof. Laurent Keller replied to the RTS to explain this organization and its consequences.

Professor Alexandre Roulin pays tribute to Commander Christophe Keckeis in a letter published by UNIL.

PUBLICATIONS

Congratulations to present DEE members (Cindy Dupuis & Ivan Mateus) and past members (Romain Savary, Fred Masclaux & Edward Rojas) for the recent publication showing the influence of genetic variation in symbiotic mycorrhizal fungi on the regulation of the lipid metabolism pathway in plants. In the mycorrhizal symbiosis, the fungi are fed lipids produced by the plant host. In this study they show that regulation of the plant lipid biosynthetic pathway is highly associated with the evolutionary history of mycorrhizal fungi, as shown by phylogenetics. Also by using genetically variable mycorrhizal fungi they were able to vary plant lipid biosynthesis gene expression that allowed them to build up a gene co-expression network allowing them to identify the key genes controlling this important plant metabolic process. Savary R., Dupuis C., Masclaux F.G. et al. Genetic variation and evolutionary history of a mycorrhizal fungus regulate the currency of exchange in symbiosis with the food security crop cassava, ISME J, (2020).

With colleagues from the i5k 5’000 arthropod genomes initiative, Prof. Waterhouse published in the journal BMC Genomics, the 1.15 Gbp draft genome and comparative analyses of the brown marmorated stink bug. This insect is a highly invasive species that feeds on more than 100 species of plants, causing substantial agricultural losses. You might be more familiar with it as a vile smelling nuisance due its habit of overwintering in our homes: “la punaise marbrée, ou diabolique” is emerging now with the arrival of spring.

In an article published in American Journal of Primatology, Dr Charlotte Canteloup, Ivan Puga-Gonzalez, Cédric Sueur and Prof. Erica van de Waal compared social networks constructed through different data collection (ad libitum sampling ; focal animal sampling) and observation methods (interaction networks: grooming and play ; proximity: arm-length distance, 2m, 5m) in a wild primate species. They found that ad libitum networks were less uncertain than focal networks and that arm‐length proximity network can be used as a proxy for a grooming network but not for a play one. This study contributes to a better understanding of what shapes social networks and which data collection method to choose to study sociality.

A research lead by Prof. Erica van de Waal and her team, with Dutch colleagues, investigating intersexual dominance was published in 'Frontiers in Psychology'. Analysing seven years of conflict data in four groups of wild vervet monkeys the study revealed that a majority of groups had a female as alpha and not a male. The factors promoting this female dominance seem to be a greater sex-ratio of males in groups leading to more male-male conflicts resulting in females rising in rank due to the winner-looser effect as well as females' coalitions in conflicts. This publication has been the subject of several press releases in 24heures and HeidiNews. and in the UNIL news.

Prof. John Pannell featured recently in a Q&A article in Current Biology. The piece reveals anecdotes about John’s career until now, the people who influenced him, how he arrived at some of the scientific questions that interest him, and a few of his thoughts about the importance of maintaining diversity at universities and in biology departments in particular.

Dr Jeanne Tonnabel, former postdoc from the Pannell lab, in collaboration with Patrice David from CNRS, Montpellier, has published an article in Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, B, in which she undertakes the first application of classical Bateman gradients to the study of sexual selection in plants.

Several members of the Pannell lab, principally former postdocs Paris Veltsos and Katie Ridout, have published a paper in the journal Genetics documenting the early stages in the evolution of sex chromosomes in the plant Mercurialis annua. Their work shows that the Y chromosome of M. annua has a large non-recombining region that is, however, still almost completely intact, with very mild indications of degeneration.

An other work from the Pannell lab, recently published in New Physiologist by PhD students Xinji Li, Jörn Gerchen, former PhD student Guillaume Cossard and former postdoc Paris Veltsos, demonstrated that individuals of M. annua bred so that they had two Y chromosomes and no X, were fully viable but sterile, confirming the largely intact nature of the Y.

DEE LIFE

The Faculty of Biology and Medicine have edited some hygiene and security guidelines linked to the partial re-opening and conditional authorization to work on-site.