Publications associées à Red squirrels in the British Isles are infected with leprosy bacilli

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

Bacterial diversity dominates variable macrophage responses of tuberculosis patients in Tanzania

Jacques Fellay, Zhi Ming Xu

The Mycobacterium tuberculosis complex (MTBC) comprises nine human-adapted lineages that differ in their geographical distribution. Local adaptation of specific MTBC genotypes to the respective human host population has been invoked in this context. We aim ...

Nature Portfolio2024

SORI: A softness-rendering interface to unravel the nature of softness perception

Jamie Paik, Mustafa Mete, Hwayeong Jeong

Tactile perception of softness serves a critical role in the survival, well-being, and social interaction among various species, including humans. This perception informs activities from food selection in animals to medical palpation for disease detection ...

National Academy of Sciences2024

Impact of phylogeny on structural contact inference from protein sequence data

Nicola Dietler, Umberto Lupo, Anne-Florence Raphaëlle Bitbol

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

Writing and Drawing Inventions: Patents and Technology in France and the United States (18th-19th centuries)

Jérôme Baudry

Description (through texts, images, models or samples) played a central role in the patent regimes that emerged in the eighteenth century, first in England, later in the United States and in France. Description ensured that the contract—protection in excha ...

2023

Development and validation of a multiplex real-time qPCR assay using GMP-grade reagents for leprosy diagnosis

Stewart Cole, Charlotte Avanzi, Thyago Leal Calvo

Author summaryLeprosy is a chronic dermato-neurological disease caused by Mycobacterium leprae, an obligate intracellular bacterium. Diagnosis of leprosy often relies on skin examinations for clinical signs, bacilli staining from skin smears and invasive s ...

PUBLIC LIBRARY SCIENCE2022

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

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

Mitochondrial Pseudogenes Suggest Repeated Inter-Species Hybridization among Direct Human Ancestors

Konstantin Popadin

The hypothesis that the evolution of humans involves hybridization between diverged species has been actively debated in recent years. We present the following novel evidence in support of this hypothesis: the analysis of nuclear pseudogenes of mtDNA ("NUM ...

MDPI2022

Transposon-activated POU5F1B promotes colorectal cancer growth and metastasis

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

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

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

Mycobacterium leprae diversity and population dynamics in medieval Europe from novel ancient genomes

Stewart Cole, Philippe Busso, Charlotte Avanzi

Background Hansen's disease (leprosy), widespread in medieval Europe, is today mainly prevalent in tropical and subtropical regions with around 200,000 new cases reported annually. Despite its long history and appearance in historical records, its origins ...

BMC2021

Evolutionary history expands the range of signaling interactions in hybrid multikinase networks

Mohamed Barakat, Anne-Florence Raphaëlle Bitbol

Two-component systems (TCSs) are ubiquitous signaling pathways, typically comprising a sensory histidine kinase (HK) and a response regulator, which communicate via intermolecular kinase-to-receiver domain phosphotransfer. Hybrid HKs constitute non-canonic ...

NATURE RESEARCH2021

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

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

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

GA4GH: International policies and standards for data sharing across genomic research and healthcare

Jean-Pierre Hubaux, Junjun Zhang, Jamal Nasir

The Global Alliance for Genomics and Health (GA4GH) aims to accelerate biomedical advances by enabling the responsible sharing of clinical and genomic data through both harmonized data aggregation and federated approaches. The decreasing cost of genomic se ...

Elsevier2021

Genomic Characterization of Mycobacterium lepraeto Explore Transmission Patterns Identifies New Subtype in Bangladesh

Stewart Cole, Andrej Benjak, Charlotte Avanzi

Mycobacterium leprae, the causative agent of leprosy, is an unculturable bacterium with a considerably reduced genome (3.27 Mb) compared to homologues mycobacteria from the same ancestry. In 2001, the genome ofM. lepraewas first described and subsequently ...

Frontiers Media SA2020

Population Genomics of Mycobacterium leprae Reveals a New Genotype in Madagascar and the Comoros

Stewart Cole, Philippe Busso, Pushpendra Singh, Stefanie Boy-Röttger, Andrej Benjak, Charlotte Avanzi, Thyago Leal Calvo

Human settlement of Madagascar traces back to the beginning of the first millennium with the arrival of Austronesians from Southeast Asia, followed by migrations from Africa and the Middle East. Remains of these different cultural, genetic, and linguistic ...

Frontiers Media SA2020

Barcoding analysis and taxonomic revision of Goliathus Lamarck, 1802 (Scarabaeidae, Cetoniinae)

Michele De Palma

We conducted barcoding analysis of valid taxa in the genus Goliathus Lamarck, 1802 and clarified their relationships. Specimens of Goliathus goliatus (Drury, 1770) sampled in tropical rainforests from Cameroon to Kenya display degrees of genetic and phenot ...

2020

The foreign oligochaete species Quistadrilus multisetosus (Smith, 1900) in Lake Geneva: morphological and molecular characterization and environmental influences on its distribution

Benoît Jean Dominique Ferrari, Régis Lionel Vivien

The presence of the oligochaete species Quistadrilus multisetosus (Smith, 1900) originating from North America has been mentioned for several decades in Europe, the Middle East and Russia. Its distribution and abundance in Europe is still unknown but it ca ...

2020

Advanced Neurotechnologies for the Restoration of Motor Function

Silvestro Micera, Friedhelm Christoph Hummel

Stroke is one of the leading causes of long-term disability. Advanced technological solutions ("neurotechnologies'') exploiting robotic systems and electrodes that stimulate the nervous system can increase the efficacy of stroke rehabilitation. Recent stud ...

2020