Sometimes I forget that I no longer work with humans, mice or drosophila. Working in non-model species, everything is more complicated. I'm lucky that Aziz & team have already accumulated a massive amount of knowledge on Sitophilus spp., including the tools to study them! However, one of the things that were missing was real-time RT PCR reference genes to compare gene expression across development. For this task, the entire SymSIm team came together to find the best reference genes based on this huge dataset we had previously accumulated, and that you can find here. Hopefully this will also be useful for other researchers! You can find our report here.
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Hi! I'm a bit late at this website news but here it is! We got a couple of papers published this last year, and I'm pretty happy Elisa & Mariana, our post-docs, could finish their time with us, with some excellent papers! There are still many to come, but, as usual, we are slow!
The first one is a trial in understanding the regulation of Sodalis pierantonius, the intracellular bacteria of Sitophilus oryzae, in ovaries. So, personally, I'm really proud of this paper simply because I did the FISH (Séverine took the wonderful pictures, and Agnès dissected the ovaries, so "I did" is an exaggeration), but also most of the bioinformatic analysis (Mariana, of course, did the mapping and thought me, with Nicolas, all I know of bioinfo!). So yes, it feels good to have finally "proof" that maybe I can indeed do bioinformatics in addition to bench work!
I'll leave you with the paper and this gorgeous ovary picture. I mean, look at that pink bacteria potentially crossing the germarium to infect the embryos!!! And those polarized bacteria in the embryos! I LOVE IT!
Our latest work on power couple Sitophilus oryzae-Sodalis pierantonius just got out in Microbiome. You can read it here but you can also just look at the cool (albeit a bit annoying music) made by Research square:
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