Publications related to A comprehensive assessment of demographic, environmental, and host genetic associations with gut microbiome diversity in healthy individuals

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

Reconstruction and analysis of genome-scale metabolic networks in single organisms and microbial communities

Evangelia Vagena

Microorganisms are a key component in the chain of life. They are essential for agriculture, produce a large proportion of oxygen, and play a central role in the cycle of elements. Microorganisms are widely used in the production of food and alcoholic beve ...

EPFL2024

The dynamic genetic determinants of increased transcriptional divergence in spermatids

Christina Ernst

Cis-genetic effects are key determinants of transcriptional divergence in discrete tissues and cell types. However, how cis- and trans-effects act across continuous trajectories of cellular differentiation in vivo is poorly understood. Here, we quantify al ...

Nature Portfolio2024

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

Massimo Bourquin

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

Microfluidic systems for infectious disease diagnostics

Thomas Lehnert, Martinus Gijs

Microorganisms, encompassing both uni- and multicellular entities, exhibit remarkable diversity as omnipresent life forms in nature. They play a pivotal role by supplying essential components for sustaining biological processes across diverse ecosystems, i ...

Royal Soc Chemistry2024

Comparison of Three Viral Nucleic Acid Preamplification Pipelines for Sewage Viral Metagenomics

Tamar Kohn, Xavier Fernandez Cassi

Viral metagenomics is a useful tool for detecting multiple human viruses in urban sewage. However, more refined protocols are required for its effective use in disease surveillance. In this study, we investigated the performance of three different preampli ...

2024

Meeting our Makers: Uncovering the cis-regulatory activity of transposable elements using statistical learning

Cyril David Son-Tuyên Pulver

The adaptation of organisms to their environment depends on the innovative potential inherent to genetic variation. In complex organisms such as mammals, processes like development and immunity require tight gene regulation. Complex forms emerge more often ...

EPFL2024

Tree diversity reduces variability in sapling survival under drought

Charlotte Grossiord, Xiaojuan Liu, Jingjing Liang

Enhancing tree diversity may be important to fostering resilience to drought-related climate extremes. So far, little attention has been given to whether tree diversity can increase the survival of trees and reduce its variability in young forest plantatio ...

Wiley2024

The autism susceptibility kinase, TAOK2, phosphorylates eEF2 and modulates translation

Nagammal Neelagandan

Genes implicated in translation control have been associated with autism spectrum disorders (ASDs). However, some important genetic causes of autism, including the 16p11.2 microdeletion, bear no obvious connection to translation. Here, we use proteomics, g ...

Amer Assoc Advancement Science2024

Fungal community composition predicts forest carbon storage at a continental scale

Nina Marion Aurélia Van Tiel

Forest soils harbor hyper-diverse microbial communities which fundamentally regulate carbon and nutrient cycling across the globe. Directly testing hypotheses on how microbiome diversity is linked to forest carbon storage has been difficult, due to a lack ...

Nature Portfolio2024

Ancestral genome reconstruction enhances transposable element annotation by identifying degenerate integrants

Didier Trono, Evaristo Jose Planet Letschert, Wayo Matsushima

Growing evidence indicates that transposable elements (TEs) play important roles in evolution by providing genomes with coding and non-coding sequences. Identification of TE-derived functional elements, however, has relied on TE annotations in individual s ...

2024

Benchmarking informatics approaches for virus discovery: caution is needed when combining in silico identification methods

Jaspreet Singh Saini

Understanding the ecological impacts of viruses on natural and engineered ecosystems relies on the accurate identification of viral sequences from community sequencing data. To maximize viral recovery from metagenomes, researchers frequently combine viral ...

Amer Soc Microbiology2024

Bactericidal effect of tetracycline in E. coli strain ED1a may be associated with ribosome dysfunction

Martin Beck, Camille Véronique Bernadette Goemans, Christian Eugen Zimmerli

Ribosomes translate the genetic code into proteins. Recent technical advances have facilitated in situ structural analyses of ribosome functional states inside eukaryotic cells and the minimal bacterium Mycoplasma. However, such analyses of Gram-negative b ...

Nature Research2024

Single-mitosis dissection of acute and chronic DNA mutagenesis and repair

Christina Ernst

How chronic mutational processes and punctuated bursts of DNA damage drive evolution of the cancer genome is poorly understood. Here, we demonstrate a strategy to disentangle and quantify distinct mechanisms underlying genome evolution in single cells, dur ...

Nature Portfolio2024

Innovative Biomarkers for Obesity and Type 1 Diabetes Based on Bifidobacterium and Metabolomic Profiling

Stephan Morgenthaler, Paul Refinetti, Mariya Yuryevna Skvortsova

The role of Bifidobacterium species and microbial metabolites such as short-chain fatty acids (SCFAs) and human milk oligosaccharides in controlling intestinal inflammation and the pathogenesis of obesity and type 1 diabetes (T1D) has been largely studied ...

MDPI2024

Identifying genetic and dietary modulators of metabolic disorders using systems genetics

Xiaoxu Li

Long-term consumption of lipid-rich foods can contribute to common metabolic diseases and systemic low-grade inflammation. However, dietary responses and the development of non-communicable diseases are shaped by genetic factors and gene-by-environment int ...

EPFL2023

Associations of genetic and infectious risk factors with coronary heart disease

Roxane De La Harpe, Jacques Fellay, Flavia Aurelia Shoko Hodel, Christian Axel Wandall Thorball, Zhi Ming Xu

Coronary heart disease (CHD) is one of the most pressing health problems of our time and a major cause of preventable death. CHD results from complex interactions between genetic and environmental factors. Using multiplex serological testing for persistent ...

eLIFE SCIENCES PUBL LTD2023

Neural ADMIXTURE for rapid genomic clustering

Albert Dominguez Mantes

Characterizing the genetic structure of large cohorts has become increasingly important as genetic studies extend to massive, increasingly diverse biobanks. Popular methods decompose individual genomes into fractional cluster assignments with each cluster ...

SPRINGERNATURE2023

Predicting type 2 diabetes risk before and after solid organ transplantation using polygenic scores in a Danish cohort

Jacques Fellay, Christian Axel Wandall Thorball

Type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) can be multifactorial where both genetics and environmental factors play a role. We aimed to investigate the use of polygenic risk scores (PRS) in the prediction of pre-transplant T2DM and post-transplant diabetes mellitus ( ...

Frontiers Media Sa2023

The Effects of Spatial Organization and Fluid Flow on the Social Interactions in Microbial Communities

Jeremy Pak Hei Wong

Bacteria often engage in social interactions with neighbouring bacteria. Ecosystems which are subjected to social interactions have been widely studied in well mixed settings such as test tubes, allowing us to identify the cellular components contributing ...

EPFL2023