Publications by Christian Iseli

Melanin and Neurotransmitter Signalling Genes Are Differentially Co-Expressed in Growing Feathers of White and Rufous Barn Owls

Christian Iseli, Nicolas Jean Philippe Guex

Regulation of melanin-based pigmentation is complex, involving multiple genes. Because different genes can contribute to the same pigmentation phenotype, the genes identified in model organisms may not necessarily apply to wild species. In the barn owl (Ty ...

WILEY2025

Biomathematical enzyme kinetics model of prebiotic autocatalytic RNA networks: degenerating parasite-specific hyperparasite catalysts confer parasite resistance and herald the birth of molecular immunity

Christian Iseli

Catalysis and specifically autocatalysis are the quintessential building blocks of life. Yet, although autocatalytic networks are necessary, they are not sufficient for the emergence of life-like properties, such as replication and adaptation. The ultimate ...

PUBLIC LIBRARY SCIENCE2025

Repairing a deleterious domestication variant in a floral regulator gene of tomato by base editing

Christian Iseli, Nicolas Jean Philippe Guex, Giovanna Ambrosini

Crop genomes accumulate deleterious mutations—a phenomenon known as the cost of domestication. Precision genome editing has been proposed to eliminate such potentially harmful mutations; however, experimental demonstration is lacking. Here we identified a ...

2025

DNA methylation by CcrM contributes to genome maintenance in the Agrobacterium tumefaciens plant pathogen

Christian Iseli, Nicolas Jean Philippe Guex, Giovanna Ambrosini

The cell cycle-regulated DNA methyltransferase CcrM is conserved in most Alphaproteobacteria, but its role in bacteria with complex or multicentric genomes remains unexplored. Here, we compare the methylome, the transcriptome and the phenotypes of wild-typ ...

OXFORD UNIV PRESS2024

Inhibition of anti-tumor immunity by melanoma cell-derived Activin-A depends on STING

Christian Iseli, Nicolas Jean Philippe Guex, Daniel Constam, Giovanna Ambrosini, Katarina Pinjusic

The transforming growth factor-beta (TGF-beta) family member activin A (hereafter Activin-A) is overexpressed in many cancer types, often correlating with cancer-associated cachexia and poor prognosis. Activin-A secretion by melanoma cells indirectly imped ...

Frontiers Media Sa2024

Variant-specific pathophysiological mechanisms of AFF3 differently influence transcriptome profiles

Christian Iseli, Nicolas Jean Philippe Guex, Giovanna Ambrosini

Background: We previously described the KINSSHIP syndrome, an autosomal dominant disorder associated with intellectual disability (ID), mesomelic dysplasia and horseshoe kidney,caused by de novo variants in the degron of AFF3. Mouse knock-ins and overexpre ...

BMC2024

tRNA-derived fragments in T lymphocyte-beta cell crosstalk and in type 1 diabetes pathogenesis in NOD mice

Christian Iseli, Nicolas Jean Philippe Guex

Aims/hypothesistRNAs play a central role in protein synthesis. Besides this canonical function, they were recently found to generate non-coding RNA fragments (tRFs) regulating different cellular activities. The aim of this study was to assess the involveme ...

SPRINGER2024

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

Christian Iseli

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

DNA modifications impact natural transformation of Acinetobacter baumannii

Christian Iseli, Nicolas Jean Philippe Guex, Melanie Blokesch, Nina Vesel, Alexandre Lemopoulos

Acinetobacter baumannii is a dangerous nosocomial pathogen, especially due to its ability to rapidly acquire new genetic traits, including antibiotic resistance genes (ARG). In A. baumannii, natural competence for transformation, one of the primary modes o ...

2023

Chromosome-level organization of the regulatory genome in the Drosophila nervous system

Christian Iseli, Nicolas Jean Philippe Guex, Julien Dorier, Marion Leleu, Brian Donal McCabe, Rebecca Carolyn Smith

Previous studies have identified topologically associating domains (TADs) as basic units of genome organization. We present evidence of a previously unreported level of genome folding, where distant TAD pairs, megabases apart, interact to form meta-domains ...

2023

A phase 1 trial of adoptive transfer of vaccine-primed autologous circulating T cells in ovarian cancer

Christian Iseli

We have previously shown that vaccination with tumor-pulsed dendritic cells amplifies neoantigen recognition in ovarian cancer. Here, in a phase 1 clinical study (NCT01312376/UPCC26810) including 19 patients, we show that such responses are further reinvig ...

NATURE PORTFOLIO2023

Epigenetic silencing of selected hypothalamic neuropeptides in narcolepsy with cataplexy

Christian Iseli, Andrea Agnoletto

Narcolepsy with cataplexy is a sleep disorder caused by deficiency in the hypothalamic neuropeptide hypocretin/orexin (HCRT), unanimously believed to result from autoimmune destruction of hypocretin-producing neurons. HCRT deficiency can also occur in seco ...

National Academy of Sciences2023

Unexpected post‐glacial colonisation route explains the white colour of barn owls ( Tyto alba ) from the British Isles

Christian Iseli, Nicolas Jean Philippe Guex

The climate fluctuations of the Quaternary shaped the movement of species in and out of glacial refugia. In Europe, the majority of species followed one of the described traditional postglacial recolonization routes from the southern peninsulas towards the ...

2022

Essential role of Cp190 in physical and regulatory boundary formation

Christian Iseli, Nicolas Jean Philippe Guex, Julien Dorier

Boundaries in animal genomes delimit contact domains with enhanced internal contact frequencies and have debated functions in limiting regulatory cross-talk between domains and guiding enhancers to target promoters. Most mammalian boundaries form by stalli ...

2022

Revisiting the specificity and ability of phospho-S129 antibodies to capture alpha-synuclein biochemical and pathological diversity

Christian Iseli, Nicolas Jean Philippe Guex, Hilal Lashuel, Anass Chiki, Ramanath Narayana Hegde, Anne-Laure Mahul Mellier, Ritwik Burai, Sean Michael Deguire, Melek Firat Altay, Sonia Donzelli, Jonathan Jean-Pierre Ricci, Salvatore Novello, Pedro José Santana Ribeiro Magalhães, Yllza Jasiqi

Antibodies against phosphorylated alpha-synuclein (aSyn) at 5129 have emerged as the primary tools to investigate, monitor, and quantify aSyn pathology in the brain and peripheral tissues of patients with Parkinson's disease and other neurodegenerative dis ...

NATURE PORTFOLIO2022

SPICA: Swiss portal for immune cell analysis

Christian Iseli, Nicolas Jean Philippe Guex

Single-cell transcriptomics allows the study of immune cell heterogeneity at an unprecedented level of resolution. The Swiss portal for immune cell analysis (SPICA) is a web resource dedicated to the exploration and analysis of single-cell RNA-seq data of ...

OXFORD UNIV PRESS2022

CTCF loss has limited effects on global genome architecture in Drosophila despite critical regulatory functions

Christian Iseli, Nicolas Jean Philippe Guex, Julien Dorier, Flavia Marzetta

Vertebrate genomes are partitioned into contact domains defined by enhanced internal contact frequency and formed by two principal mechanisms: compartmentalization of transcriptionally active and inactive domains, and stalling of chromosomal loop-extruding ...

Nature Research2021

Cell-autonomous inflammation of BRCA1-deficient ovarian cancers drives both tumor-intrinsic immunoreactivity and immune resistance via STING

Christian Iseli, Julien Dorier, Mauro Delorenzi, Alizée Jéléna Grimm, Marco Mina, George Coukos, Alexandre Harari, Giovanni Ciriello

In this study, we investigate mechanisms leading to inflammation and immunoreactivity in ovarian tumors with homologous recombination deficiency (HRD). BRCA1 loss is found to lead to transcriptional reprogramming in tumor cells and cell-intrinsic inflammat ...

2021

Blood virosphere in febrile Tanzanian children

Christian Iseli, Thomas Junier, Nicolas Jean Philippe Guex, Mary-Anne Hartley, Jacques Fellay

Viral infections are the leading cause of childhood acute febrile illnesses motivating consultation in sub-Saharan Africa. The majority of causal viruses are never identified in low-resource clinical settings as such testing is either not part of routine s ...

2021

Neighbor predation linked to natural competence fosters the transfer of large genomic regions in Vibrio cholerae

Christian Iseli, Nicolas Jean Philippe Guex, Noémie Matthey, Melanie Blokesch, Candice Stoudmann, Sandrine Stutzmann

Natural competence for transformation is a primary mode of horizontal gene transfer. Competent bacteria are able to absorb free DNA from their surroundings and exchange this DNA against pieces of their own genome when sufficiently homologous. However, the ...

2019