Come visit us at @unil.bsky.social ! 😃
09.03.2026 16:11
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Come visit us at @unil.bsky.social ! 😃
We just published a review article as a book chapter of Advances in Ecological Research. This review focuses on interdisciplinary fields between genome-assisted breeding and community genetics. Please DM if you want a reprint. doi.org/10.1016/bs.a...
Many organisms, including humans, reshape their environments in ways that influence the conditions faced by future generations. We ask whether this can favour biological variation with @irisprigent.bsky.social in our new paper. Thanks to @dee-unil.bsky.social @snsf.ch
www.pnas.org/doi/full/10....
A member of the Hymenoptera order, Colletes cunicularius, has an evolutionarily conserved sex-determination mechanism. CREDIT: NJ Vereecken
A sex-determining gene region in ants, bees, and wasps has maintained its function for over 150 million years through its chromosomal position rather than its DNA sequence, as evidenced by the lack of sequence homology among lineages. In PNAS: https://ow.ly/n9eU50XWipU
Excited to share that I’m starting a research group at MPI for Biology Tübingen — and we’re recruiting PhD students!
We are offering two fully funded PhD positions on sex determination and development in Hymenoptera 🐜🐝.
Please share with prospective students who might be interested.
Sign up now for EMBO Workshop "Molecular mechanisms of selfish elements and strategies" in Bern, Switzerland, 8–11 February 2026.
Abstract submission/Registration by: 15 December 2025/15 January 2026
https://meetings.embo.org/event/26-selfish-elements
#EMBOselfishElements #GeneSky #EMBOevents 🧪
It opens many questions on the phenotypic effects mediating the preferential predation, and on the co-evolution between durum wheat and Messor ants!
The originality of this work is that preferential predation of specific wheat genotypes was shown in real plant stands, directly in the field, i.e., not by making ants chose between different seeds in lab settings.
He could confirm the effect of the locus based on a cafeteria experiment
Quite interestingly, he could explain a large proportion of this preferential attacks by allelic variation at a specific genomic region on chr. 2A, containing a 3.6 Mb chromosomal inversion
Clément noticed that specific durum wheat genotypes got attacked by Messor barbarus ants in the field
Check-out this very interesting result by Clément Plessis, PhD student in our group!
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...
He could confirm the effect of the locus based on a cafeteria experiment
Quite interestingly, he could explain a large proportion of this preferential attacks by allelic variation at a specific genomic region on chr. 2A, containing a 3.6 Mb chromosomal inversion
Clément noticed that specific durum wheat genotypes got attacked by Messor barabarus ants in the field.
Fig. 1.Experimental design. (A and B) Close-up views of RhizoTubes® showing wheat seedlings and their roots. (C) Spatial distribution of the seedlings within the RhizoTubes® in both pure (up) and mixed (bottom) stands. Different colours represent different genotypes. (D) Schematic representation of the experiment; each dark square represents a RhizoTube®. The green squares are the control RhizoTubes® and are all grown with the same wheat variety to check environmental heterogeneity.
🌱 RESEARCH 🌱
Wheat varieties with a high root projected area in pure stands experience a strong relaxation of below-ground competition in mixtures at the seedling stage under resource-limited conditions – Montazeaud et al.
🔗 doi.org/10.1093/jxb/...
#PlantScience 🧪 @germtz.bsky.social
Check out this cool work from @crouxevo.bsky.social and others, congrats!!! 🥳
Rapid establishment of species barriers in plants compared with that in animals | Science www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
Stay tuned for the upcoming call for contributions!
Among many symposia, I'll be co-animating one on genetic models accounting for intra-specific interactions, covering trees, plants, animals, with Piter Bijma (WUR) as an invited.
Save the date!
Next fall (2026), we will be hosting an interdisciplinary conference on crop diversification in Paris.
More information available here: listes.umontpellier.fr/sympa/d_read...
The PhD contract is funded by the University of Montpellier (PTL1) which covers salary for 3 years + ~ 25K functioning costs
The PhD student will work on root branching phenotyping, QTL validation, and varietal mixture experiments to decipher the link between root branching, resource availability, and plant-plant interactions
Our group has identified several Quantitative Trait Loci (QTLs) associated with root branching in durum wheat . Our preliminary data indicate that these QTLs associate with varietal mixture performance under contrasted environmental conditions
PhD fellowship available 📢!
We are offering a 3-year fully funded PhD fellowship at the interface between functional ecology and quantitative genetics in Montpellier FR ! (Application deadline 31 July)
Last chance to attend the school for free if you're doing your PhD in an Official Development Assistance (ODA) country ! Apply by 15 May for a full scholarship covering tuition, travel, accommodation, and meals.
This was only possible thanks to the use of the high-throughput root phenotyping platform 4pmi
at @inrae-france.bsky.social
and thus they disengage from the arms race for root proliferation and biomass accumulation. Very interesting to see such belowground plasticity in response to plant neighbours, and to identify this plasticity as a target trait for plant breeding and mixture assembly!
This is because highly competitive varieties tend to over-produce roots in monoculture because they have a highly competitive neighbour (i.e., themselves). In mixture, such highly competitive varieties benefit from having, on average, weaker competitors,