Publications related to Most recent common ancestor

Energy-harnessing problem solving of primordial life: Modeling the emergence of catalytic host-nested parasite life cycles

All life forms on earth ultimately descended from a primordial population dubbed the last universal common ancestor or LUCA via Darwinian evolution. Extant living systems share two salient functional features, a metabolism extracting and transforming energ ...

2023

Impact of phylogeny on structural contact inference from protein sequence data

Anne-Florence Raphaëlle Bitbol, Umberto Lupo, Nicola Dietler

Local and global inference methods have been developed to infer structural contacts from multiple sequence alignments of homologous proteins. They rely on correlations in amino acid usage at contacting sites. Because homologous proteins share a common ance ...

ROYAL SOC2023

Mitochondrial Pseudogenes Suggest Repeated Inter-Species Hybridization among Direct Human Ancestors

Konstantin Popadin

The hypothesis that the evolution of humans involves hybridization between diverged species has been actively debated in recent years. We present the following novel evidence in support of this hypothesis: the analysis of nuclear pseudogenes of mtDNA ("NUM ...

MDPI2022

Multi-electron Transfer by U(II) and Masked U(II) Complexes

Marinella Mazzanti

Complexes of uranium in low oxidation state have shown the ability to activate non-reactive small molecules such as N-2. However, the multi-electron transfer required for such activation remains limited in uranium chemistry. Here, we review our recent rese ...

SWISS CHEMICAL SOC2022

Evolutionary history expands the range of signaling interactions in hybrid multikinase networks

Anne-Florence Raphaëlle Bitbol, Mohamed Barakat

Two-component systems (TCSs) are ubiquitous signaling pathways, typically comprising a sensory histidine kinase (HK) and a response regulator, which communicate via intermolecular kinase-to-receiver domain phosphotransfer. Hybrid HKs constitute non-canonic ...

NATURE RESEARCH2021

KRAB zinc finger protein-mediated control of transposon-embedded regulatory sequences from human germline to early embryos

Alexandra Iouranova

Transposable elements (TEs), also called jumping genes, are genetic elements capable of changing their position within the genome of their host. They make up large fractions of genomes, including 45% of human DNA content, according to current estimates. S ...

EPFL2021

Catalyzing Bond-Dissociation in Graphene via Alkali-Iodide Molecules

Klaus Kern, Stephan Rauschenbach, Sabine Abb, Sven Alexander Szilagyi, Hannah Julia Ochner

Atomic design of a 2D-material such as graphene can be substantially influenced by etching, deliberately induced in a transmission electron microscope. It is achieved primarily by overcoming the threshold energy for defect formation by controlling the kine ...

WILEY-V C H VERLAG GMBH2021

Barcoding analysis and taxonomic revision of Goliathus Lamarck, 1802 (Scarabaeidae, Cetoniinae)

Michele De Palma

We conducted barcoding analysis of valid taxa in the genus Goliathus Lamarck, 1802 and clarified their relationships. Specimens of Goliathus goliatus (Drury, 1770) sampled in tropical rainforests from Cameroon to Kenya display degrees of genetic and phenot ...

2020

Waiting on the Fringe: cell autonomy and signaling delays in segmentation clocks

Andrew Charles Oates

The rhythmic and sequential segmentation of the vertebrate body axis into somites during embryogenesis is governed by a multicellular, oscillatory patterning system called the segmentation clock. Despite many overt similarities between vertebrates, differe ...

2020

Exploring the interactions between the human and viral genomes

Jacques Fellay

Over the last decade, genome-wide association studies led to major advances in identifying human genetic variants associated with infectious disease susceptibility. On the pathogen side, comparable methods are now applied to identify disease-modulating pat ...

SPRINGER2020

Multi-omics reveals abundant mitochondrial genomic and circadian expression variation in the Drosophila Genetic Reference Panel

Maria Litovchenko

Modern biology rapidly generates a wealth of data,which can only be analysed computationally.Despite the variety of available data types,most of them aim to provide an answer to one question: how does genotypic diversity translates into phenotypes? This qu ...

EPFL2020

Ultra-broadband time-resolved THz spectroscopy of perovskites and nanomaterials

Andrés Burgos Caminal

The fundamental study of charge carrier dynamics has been shown to be of great interest for optoelectronics, paving the way forward for future developments. Often, some of the key processes that determine the photophysics of a material occur on very short ...

EPFL2020

Beyond silence : a functional and evolutionary study of KRAB zinc finger proteins

Pierre-Yves Joseph Laurent Helleboid

Transposable elements (TEs) are genetic units capable of spreading within the genomes of their host. TEs contribute a readily recognizable 45% of the human DNA, reflecting in part their co-option for some as source of protein-coding sequences, for others a ...

EPFL2019

Chemical and biophysical methods to explore dynamic mechanisms of chromatin silencing

Beat Fierz, Iuliia Boichenko

Chromatin, the nucleoprotein complex organizing the genome, is central in regulating gene expression and genome organization. Chromatin conformational dynamics, controlled by histone post-translational modifications (PTM) and effector proteins, play a key ...

2019

New approaches for track reconstruction in LHCb's Vertex Locator

Victor Coco, Sébastien Ponce

Starting with Upgrade 1 in 2021, LHCb will move to a purely software-based trigger system. Therefore, the new trigger strategy is to process events at the full rate of 30MHz. Given that the increase of CPU performance has slowed down in recent years, the p ...

E D P SCIENCES2019

Gender medicine and oncology: report and consensus of an ESMO workshop

Jacques Fellay

Background: The importance of sex and gender as modulators of disease biology and treatment outcomes is well known in other disciplines of medicine, such as cardiology, but remains an undervalued issue in oncology. Considering the increasing evidence for t ...

OXFORD UNIV PRESS2019

Bimodal atomic force microscopy for the characterization of thiolated self-assembled monolayers

Francesco Stellacci, Quy Ong Khac, Nikolaos Nianias, Evangelia-Nefeli Athanasopoulou

Surface coatings are becoming an integral part of materials. In recent years, molecular coatings have found larger acceptance and uses. Among them, self-assembled monolayers (SAMs) are attractive due to their inherent versatility, manufacturability, and sc ...

ROYAL SOC CHEMISTRY2018

KRAB zinc-finger proteins contribute to the evolution of gene regulatory networks

Didier Trono, Michaël Imbeault, Pierre-Yves Joseph Laurent Helleboid

The human genome encodes some 350 Kruppel-associated box (KRAB) domain-containing zinc-finger proteins (KZFPs), the products of a rapidly evolving gene family that has been traced back to early tetrapods(1,2). The function of most KZFPs is unknown, but a f ...

Nature Publishing Group2017

Adult human perception of distress in the cries of bonobo, chimpanzee, and human infants

Understanding the extent to which humans perceive the emotional state of animals has both theoretical and practical implications. While recent studies indicate that natural selection has led to some convergence of emotion coding among vertebrate species (i ...

Wiley2017

The genomic landscape of human cellular circadian variation points to a novel role for the signalosome

Frédéric Bruno Martin Gachon, Konstantin Popadin, Daniel Alain Dominique Marie Mauvoisin

The importance of natural gene expression variation for human behavior is undisputed, but its impact on circadian physiology remains mostly unexplored. Using umbilical cord fibroblasts, we have determined by genome-wide association how common genetic varia ...

Elife Sciences Publications Ltd2017