Publications related to Phenotypic plasticity

The cost of adaptability: resource availability constrains functional stability under pulsed disturbances

Global change exposes ecosystems to changes in the frequency, magnitude, and concomitancy of disturbances, which impact the composition and functioning of these systems. Here, we experimentally evaluate the effects of salinity disturbances and eutrophicati ...

Amer Soc Microbiology2024

Fast adaptation to rule switching using neuronal surprise

Wulfram Gerstner, Martin Louis Lucien Rémy Barry

In humans and animals, surprise is a physiological reaction to an unexpected event, but how surprise can be linked to plausible models of neuronal activity is an open problem. We propose a self-supervised spiking neural network model where a surprise signa ...

2024

Subsurface fluorescence time-of-flight imaging using a large-format single-photon avalanche diode sensor for tumor depth assessment

Edoardo Charbon, Claudio Bruschini, Arin Can Ülkü, Yichen Feng

Significance: Fluorescence guidance is used clinically by surgeons to visualize anatomical and/or physiological phenomena in the surgical field that are difficult or impossible to detect by the naked eye. Such phenomena include tissue perfusion or molecula ...

SPIE Society of Photo-optical Instrumentation Engineers2024

Wide-scale identification of novel/eliminated genes responsible for evolutionary transformations

Daria Korotkova

BackgroundIt is generally accepted that most evolutionary transformations at the phenotype level are associated either with rearrangements of genomic regulatory elements, which control the activity of gene networks, or with changes in the amino acid conten ...

2023

Tangent functional connectomes uncover more unique phenotypic traits

Enrico Amico, Mingkui Wang

Functional connectomes (FCs) containing pairwise estimations of functional couplings between pairs of brain regions are commonly represented by correlation matrices. As symmetric positive definite matrices, FCs can be transformed via tangent space projecti ...

CELL PRESS2023

Current challenges in understanding the role of enhancers in disease

Bart Deplancke

Enhancers play a central role in the spatiotemporal control of gene expression and tend to work in a cell-type-specific manner. In addition, they are suggested to be major contributors to phenotypic variation, evolution and disease. There is growing eviden ...

NATURE PORTFOLIO2022

A tool for mapping microglial morphology, morphOMICs, reveals brain-region and sex-dependent phenotypes

Kathryn Hess Bellwald, Lida Kanari, Martina Scolamiero

Environmental cues influence the highly dynamic morphology of microglia. Strategies to characterize these changes usually involve user-selected morphometric features, which preclude the identification of a spectrum of context-dependent morphological phenot ...

NATURE PORTFOLIO2022

Above- and below-ground responses to experimental climate forcing in two forb species from montane wooded pastures in Switzerland

Alexandre Buttler, Konstantin Svetlozarov Gavazov

Mountain ecosystems are particularly threatened by ongoing climate change and the species composition of high elevation grasslands is already changing. An open research question is how these ecosystems will adapt to changes in their key environmental const ...

WILEY2022

Phenotypic plasticity versus ecotypic differentiation under recurrent summer drought in two drought-tolerant pine species

Christoph Bachofen

Despite worldwide reports of high tree mortality, growing evidence indicates that many tree species are well adapted to survive repeated dry spells. The drought resilience of trees is related to their phenotypic plasticity and ecotypic differentiation. Whe ...

WILEY2021

The genetic architecture of complex human traits at the dawn of genomic medicine

Olivier Noël Marie Naret

The focus of the work presented in this thesis is the exploration of the genetic architecture of complex human traits - at the dawn of genomic medicine. The underlying mechanisms explaining the enormously polygenic nature of most human complex traits are ...

EPFL2021

Confounding factors from inducible systems for spatiotemporal gene expression regulation

Johan Auwerx, Richardus Houtkooper

Spatiotemporally regulated targeted gene manipulation is a common way to study the effect of gene variants on phenotypic traits, but the Cre/loxP and Tet-On/Tet-Off systems can affect whole-organism physiology and function due to off-target effects. We hig ...

Rockefeller University Press2020

Automated phenotyping of Caenorhabditis elegans embryos with a high-throughput-screening microfluidic platform

Martinus Gijs, Matteo Cornaglia, Raphaël Etienne Jean Trouillon, Hüseyin Baris Atakan, Tunç Alkanat

The nematode Caenorhabditis elegans has been extensively used as a model multicellular organism to study the influence of osmotic stress conditions and the toxicity of chemical compounds on developmental and motility-associated phenotypes. However, the sev ...

2020

Plastic and genetic responses of a common sedge to warming have contrasting effects on carbon cycle processes

Luca Bragazza, Constant Signarbieux, Richard David Bardgett, Thomas William Nicholas Walker

Climate warming affects plant physiology through genetic adaptation and phenotypic plasticity, but little is known about how these mechanisms influence ecosystem processes. We used three elevation gradients and a reciprocal transplant experiment to show th ...

2019

Diet modulates cecum bacterial diversity and physiological phenotypes across the BXD mouse genetic reference population

Johan Auwerx, Evan Graehl Williams

The BXD family has become one of the preeminent genetic reference populations to understand the genetic and environmental control of phenotypic variation. Here we evaluate the responses to different levels of fat in the diet using both chow diet (CD, 13-18 ...

2019

Life-history trade-offs and limitations associated with phenotypic adaptation under future ocean warming and elevated salinity

Emma Mary Gibbin, Félix Christen

Little is known about the life-history trade-offs and limitations, and the physiological mechanisms that are associated with phenotypic adaptation to future ocean conditions. To address this knowledge gap, we investigated the within-and trans-generation li ...

ROYAL SOC2019

Commensal Gut Bacteria Buffer the Impact of Host Genetic Variants on Drosophila Developmental Traits under Nutritional Stress

Bart Deplancke, Virginie Sandra Braman, Maroun Bou Sleiman, Maria Litovchenko, Michael Vincent Frochaux

Eukaryotic genomes encode several buffering mechanisms that robustly maintain invariant phenotypic outcome despite fluctuating environmental conditions. Here we show that the Drosophila gut-associated commensals, represented by a single facultative symbion ...

2019

Systems genetics approaches to probe gene function

Hao Li

Genes are the functional units of heredity. However, the functions of many genes remain unknown, which impedes the understanding of the underlying mechanism of complex traits and diseases. Systems genetics approaches try to understand the complexity underl ...

EPFL2019

The virtuous cycle of human genetics and mouse models in drug discovery

Johan Auwerx

Ongoing studies in many species seek to understand the origins, architecture and consequences of phenotypic variation under normal and dysfunctional conditions, with the aim of identifying targets for intervention that can prevent, stabilize or reverse dis ...

NATURE PUBLISHING GROUP2019

Relationships between key functional traits of the waterlily Nuphar lutea and wetland nutrient content

Charles Pierre Roger Henriot

Little attention has been paid to how aquatic habitat characteristics affect the traits of plant species. Nuphar lutea (L.) Sm. is a keystone species distributed across temperate regions of Europe, northwest Africa and western Asia. Its apparently low phen ...

2019

Effects of climate warming on Sphagnum photosynthesis in peatlands depend on peat moisture and species-specific anatomical traits

Constant Signarbieux, Vincent Eric Jules Jassey

Climate change will influence plant photosynthesis by altering patterns of temperature and precipitation, including their variability and seasonality. Both effects may be important for peatlands as the carbon (C) sink potential of these ecosystems depends ...

WILEY2019