Publications related to Towards an Evolutionary Theory of Stress Responses

Psychosomatic response to acute emotional stress in healthy students

The multidimensionality of the stress response has shown the complexity of this phenomenon and therefore the impossibility of finding a unique biomarker among the physiological variables related to stress. An experimental study was designed and performed t ...

FRONTIERS MEDIA SA2023

Regulation of sedimentation rate shapes the evolution of multicellularity in a close unicellular relative of animals

Omaya Pierre Dudin

Significant increases in sedimentation rate accompany the evolution of multicellularity. These increases should lead to rapid changes in ecological distribution, thereby affecting the costs and benefits of multicellularity and its likelihood to evolve. How ...

PUBLIC LIBRARY SCIENCE2022

IMVEST, an immersive multimodal virtual environment stress test for humans that adjusts challenge to individual's performance

Maria del Carmen Sandi Perez, João Pedro de Matos Rodrigues, Stephan Streuber, Erik Hans Jakob Studer

Laboratory stressors are essential tools to study the human stress response. However, despite considerable progress in the development of stress induction procedures in recent years, the field is still missing standardization and the methods employed frequ ...

2021

Effective stress for unsaturated active clays and in-situ effective stress estimation methodology

Angelica Tuttolomondo

The complexity of the mechanics of active clays and, more generally, of geomaterials with clay minerals, under saturated and unsaturated conditions, still provides relevant scientific challenges today. Equally relevant challenges are the understanding of t ...

EPFL2021

Protein Structural Information and Evolutionary Landscape by In Vitro Evolution

Paolo De Los Rios

Protein structure is tightly intertwined with function according to the laws of evolution. Understanding how structure determines function has been the aim of structural biology for decades. Here, we have wondered instead whether it is possible to exploit ...

OXFORD UNIV PRESS2020

LPA1 receptor and chronic stress: Effects on behaviour and the genes involved in the hippocampal excitatory/inhibitory balance

Maria del Carmen Sandi Perez, Olivia Zanoletti, Alexandre Claude Gustave Bacq, Roman Moreno Fernandez

The LPA1 receptor, one of the six characterized G protein-coupled receptors (LPA1–6) through which lysophosphatidic acid acts, is likely involved in promoting normal emotional behaviours. Current data suggest that the LPA-LPA1-receptor pathway may be invol ...

2020

The evolution of the type VI secretion system as a disintegration weapon

Julius Hans Bernd Winter

The type VI secretion system (T6SS) is a nanomachine used by many bacteria to drive a toxin-laden needle into other bacterial cells. Although the potential to influence bacterial competition is clear, the fitness impacts of wielding a T6SS are not well und ...

PUBLIC LIBRARY SCIENCE2020

A coupled hydro – mechanical approach for modelling the volume change behaviour of compacted bentonite

Lyesse Laloui, Alessio Ferrari, Jose Antonio Bosch Llufriu

The volumetric response of compacted bentonites against environmental actions is a key aspect in most designs of nuclear waste repositories. The safety assessment of such repositories must account for robust and reliable models of stress–strain for bentoni ...

EDP SCIENCES2020

Sexual conflict drives male manipulation of female postmating responses in Drosophila melanogaster

Laurent Keller, Brian Dennis Hollis

In many animals, females respond to mating with changes in physiology and behavior that are triggered by molecules transferred by males during mating. In Drosophila melanogaster, proteins in the seminal fluid are responsible for important female postmating ...

National Academy of Sciences2019

The diversity of moral preferences: Evolutionary foundations and some implications in environmental economics

Boris Thurm

Empirical evidence suggests that there exists substantial heterogeneity in individuals' social preferences. However, there is little theoretical basis supporting this observation and economic models often assume that all individuals are identical. Hence, t ...

EPFL2019

Low vagal tone in two rat models of psychopathology involving high or low corticosterone stress responses

Maria del Carmen Sandi Perez, Damien Sébastien Huzard, Jocelin Grosse, Sriparna Ghosal

The two stress-responsive physiological systems, autonomic nervous system (ANS) and hypothalamus-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis exert complementary and interrelated actions in the organism. Individuals that suffer stress-related psychopathologies frequently ...

2019

Anisotropic behaviour of shallow opalinus clay

Lyesse Laloui, Alessio Ferrari, Alberto Minardi, Eleonora Crisci

Opalinus Clay shale, the selected host geomaterial of a high-level radioactive waste repository in Switzerland, was sourced at shallow depth in a borehole in the northern part of the country. Pairs of specimens, retrieved from the same depth were prepared ...

Springer Verlag2019

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

Likelihood-free Inference of Population Genetic Parameters from Time-Sampled Genetic Data

Hyunjin Shim

This thesis consists of five papers published in peer-reviewed journals, two of which focus on method development of time-serial inference, represented by publications in methodology journals, and three others that describe collaborative data applications ...

EPFL2018

Impact of individual differences in glucocorticoid adaptation to stress on behavior, neurophysiology and metabolism

Damien Sébastien Huzard

The stress system is a key modulator of homeostasis and allows organisms to adapt to environmental changes. Proper survival is dependent on the appropriate stress response, for example initiating food (energy) intake or provoking physical reaction. However ...

EPFL2018

The evolution of multiple active site configurations in a designed enzyme

Dusan Petrovic, Ganna Gryn'ova

Developments in computational chemistry, bioinformatics, and laboratory evolution have facilitated the de novo design and catalytic optimization of enzymes. Besides creating useful catalysts, the generation and iterative improvement of designed enzymes can ...

Nature Publishing Group2018

An energetic view of stress: Focus on mitochondria

Maria del Carmen Sandi Perez

Energy is required to sustain life and enable stress adaptation. At the cellular level, energy is largely derived from mitochondria – unique multifunctional organelles with their own genome. Four main elements connect mitochondria to stress: 1) Energy is r ...

2018

High anxiety trait: A vulnerable phenotype for stress-induced depression

Maria del Carmen Sandi Perez, Meltem Weger

A great deal of research aims to identify risk factors related to individual vulnerability to develop stress-induced psychopathologies. Here, we summarize evidence that point at anxiety trait as a significant contributor to inter-individual differences in ...

2018

Stress-Induced Depression: Is Social Rank a Predictive Risk Factor?

Maria del Carmen Sandi Perez, Thomas Didier Larrieu

An intriguing question in the field of stress is what makes an individual more likely to be susceptible or resilient to stress‐induced depression. Predisposition to stress susceptibility is believed to be influenced by genetic factors and early adversity. ...

2018

Experimental evolution of slowed cognitive aging in Drosophila melanogaster

Brian Dennis Hollis

Reproductive output and cognitive performance decline in parallel during aging, but it is unknown whether this reflects a shared genetic architecture or merely the declining force of natural selection acting independently on both traits. We used experiment ...

2017