Publications related to Phylogenetic comparative methods

The microbial genomics of glacier-fed streams: adaptations to an extreme ecosystem

Glacier-fed streams are the cold, ultra-oligotrophic, and unstable streams that are fed by glacial meltwater. Despite these extreme conditions, they harbour a diverse and abundant microbial diversity that develops into biofilms, covering the boulders and s ...

EPFL2024

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

Transposon-activated POU5F1B promotes colorectal cancer growth and metastasis

Didier Trono, Laurence Gouzi Abrami, Sandra Eloise Kjeldsen, Evaristo Jose Planet Letschert, Julien Léonard Duc, Laia Simo Riudalbas, Alexandre Coudray, Sagane Dind

The treatment of colorectal cancer (CRC) is an unmet medical need in absence of early diagnosis. Here, upon characterizing cancer-specific transposable element-driven transpochimeric gene transcripts (TcGTs) produced by this tumor in the SYSCOL cohort, we ...

Nature Research2022

Extracting phylogenetic dimensions of coevolution reveals hidden functional signals

Anne-Florence Raphaëlle Bitbol

Despite the structural and functional information contained in the statistical coupling between pairs of residues in a protein, coevolution associated with function is often obscured by artifactual signals such as genetic drift, which shapes a protein's ph ...

Nature Portfolio2022

The microbiome of cryospheric ecosystems

Tom Ian Battin, Hannes Markus Peter, Susheel Bhanu Busi, Grégoire Marie Octave Edouard Michoud, Leïla Ezzat, Massimo Bourquin, Tyler Joe Kohler, Stylianos Fodelianakis

The cryosphere includes those parts of Earth where water or soil is frozen, such as snow, ice, glaciers and permafrost soils. Here, the authors present a global inventory of cryospheric microbial communities and their genetic repertoires. ...

Nature Portfolio2022

Phylogenetic estimation of the viral fitness landscape of HIV-1 set-point viral load

Jacques Fellay, Luca Ferretti

Set-point viral load (SPVL), a common measure of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV)-1 virulence, is partially determined by viral genotype. Epidemiological evidence suggests that this viral property has been under stabilising selection, with a typical opti ...

OXFORD UNIV PRESS2022

From Trees to Barcodes and Back Again: A Combinatorial, Probabilistic and Geometric Study of a Topological Inverse Problem

Adélie Eliane Garin

In this thesis, we investigate the inverse problem of trees and barcodes from a combinatorial, geometric, probabilistic and statistical point of view. Computing the persistent homology of a merge tree yields a barcode B. Reconstructing a tree from B invol ...

EPFL2022

Disparate temperature-dependent virus-host dynamics for SARS-CoV-2 and SARS-CoV in the human respiratory epithelium

Bart Deplancke, Bastien Mangeat, Vincent Roland Julien Gardeux, Julie Marie Russeil, Jörn Pezoldt, Elisa Cora, Daniel Alpern

Since its emergence in December 2019, Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) has spread globally and become a major public health burden. Despite its close phylogenetic relationship to SARS-CoV, SARS-CoV-2 exhibits increased human-to- ...

2021

MPGM: Scalable and Accurate Multiple Network Alignment

Matthias Grossglauser, Ehsan Kazemi

Protein-protein interaction (PPI) network alignment is a canonical operation to transfer biological knowledge among species. The alignment of PPI-networks has many applications, such as the prediction of protein function, detection of conserved network mot ...

IEEE COMPUTER SOC2020

A modern scleractinian coral with a two-component calcite–aragonite skeleton

Anders Meibom, Jaroslaw Hubert Stolarski

One of the most conserved traits in the evolution of biomineralizing organisms is the taxon-specific selection of skeletal minerals. All modern scleractinian corals are thought to produce skeletons exclusively of the calcium-carbonate polymorph aragonite. ...

2021

Detection of dicistroviruses RNA in blood of febrile Tanzanian children

Mary-Anne Hartley, Thomas Junier

Fever is the leading cause of paediatric outpatient consultations in Sub-Saharan Africa. Although most are suspected to be of viral origin, a putative causative pathogen is not identified in over a quarter of these febrile episodes. Using a de novo assembl ...

2019

The modern analogue of a Cretaceous coral with a calcitic skeleton

Anders Meibom, Jaroslaw Hubert Stolarski

It was argued that, in contrast to all known modern scleractinian corals that form aragonite skeletons, the original mineralogy of the Cretaceous "Coelosmilia" (ca. 70-65 Ma) was calcite during a period when the Mg2+/Ca2+ ratio of the seawater was presumab ...

2019

Lateral variations and vertical structure of the microbial methane cycle in the sediment of Lake Onego (Russia)

Natacha Tofield-Pasche, Nathalie Dubois

The significance of methane production by lakes to the global production of greenhouse gas is well acknowledged while underlying processes sustaining the lacustrine methane budget remain largely unknown. We coupled biogeochemical data to functional and phy ...

2019

Dissecting HIV Virulence: Heritability of Setpoint Viral Load, CD4+ T Cell Decline and Per-Parasite Pathogenicity

Jacques Fellay, Gabriel Leventhal

Pathogen strains may differ in virulence because they attain different loads in their hosts, or because they induce different disease-causing mechanisms independent of their load. In evolutionary ecology, the latter is referred to as" per-parasite pathogen ...

Oxford University Press2018

Statistical Analysis of Protein Sequences: A Coevolutionary Study of Molecular Chaperones

Duccio Malinverni

Recent advances in DNA sequencing technologies led to the accumulation of enormous quantities of genetic information available in public databases. This rapid growth of available biological datasets calls for quantitative analysis tools and concomitantly o ...

EPFL2018

The membrane-bound C subunit of reductive dehalogenases: topology analysis and reconstitution of the FMN-binding domain of PceC

Julien Maillard, Romain Hamelin, Mathilde Stéphanie Willemin, Géraldine Florence Buttet, Aamani Rupakula Boyanapalli

Organohalide respiration (OHR) is the energy metabolism of anaerobic bacteria able to use halogenated organic compounds as terminal electron acceptors. While the terminal enzymes in OHR, so-called reductive dehalogenases, are well-characterized, the identi ...

Frontiers Media SA2018

The Membrane-Bound C Subunit of Reductive Dehalogenases: Topology Analysis and Reconstitution of the FMN-Binding Domain of PceC

Julien Maillard, Romain Hamelin, Mathilde Stéphanie Willemin, Géraldine Florence Buttet, Aamani Rupakula Boyanapalli

Organohalide respiration (OHR) is the energy metabolism of anaerobic bacteria able to use halogenated organic compounds as terminal electron acceptors. While the terminal enzymes in OHR, so-called reductive dehalogenases, are well-characterized, the identi ...

Frontiers Media SA2018

Form - function relationships in dragonfly mandibles under an evolutionary perspective

Alessandra Patera

Functional requirements may constrain phenotypic diversification or foster it. For insect mouthparts, the quantification of the relationship between shape and function in an evolutionary framework remained largely unexplored. Here, the question of a functi ...

Royal Soc2017

Delta-Notch signalling in segmentation

Andrew Charles Oates

Modular body organization is found widely across multicellular organisms, and some of them form repetitive modular structures via the process of segmentation. It's vastly interesting to understand how these regularly repeated structures are robustly genera ...

Elsevier Sci Ltd2017

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