This project aims to investigate the human biological impact of two neglected dispersal events during the last 2 millennia in the Indian Ocean: the Indian Ocean slave trade (eastward) and the Indonesian settlement of Madagascar (westward). By generating new genome-wide data we will characterize genetic and epigenetic human variation in order to detect demographic/migratory population histories and selective pressures that affect human variation in a changing environment (diseases/pathogens, climate) and over a short time-period. Results will be interpreted using non-genetic evidence (historical, linguistic, archaeological data). This inter-disciplinary project using a new range of tools (genomic associated to epigenomic) should lead to significant results in the field of human environmental adaptation and genetic anthropology.

MEET, “Mytilus mussels and their Environment: a phenotypic and genomic Exploration through Time”, is a multi-disciplinary project aiming at better understanding the responses of coastal populations to environmental shifts. This will be achieved by tracking morphological and genomic changes in wild Mytilus mussels through time and across environmental gradients. This novel approach will combine 2D/3D-morphometric, ancient DNA, stable isotope and trace element analyses of a unique collection of shells from the Baltic Sea and Greenland dated to the last 9,000 years. MEET provides a unique opportunity to characterise, at high-resolution, the interplay between the different biological responses of mussels to environmental changes, their speed and magnitude, while controlling for their confounding effects. The objectives of MEET are relevant to the growing societal concern over on-going global environmental changes and their damaging consequences on biodiversity.

Half of the energy consumed in Europe is used to produce heat or cold, largely for heating and cooling. This production contributes to a substantial part of European CO2 emissions. Moreover, in energy systems with high entropy, large amounts of heat are permanently lost and heat up natural environments or cities. In this respect, the regulation of thermal flows, which are omnipresent and yet largely invisible, constitutes a fundamental issue in the perspective of an ecological transition. In France, however, this regulation is not undertaken in a systemic manner. It is framed by sectoral policies (environment, energy, industry, housing) whose objectives do not converge or even conflict. The METABOL'HEAT project intends to contribute to the emergence of a systemic heat and cold policy by highlighting the problems that hinder its development and by networking the actors likely to define the solutions to these problems. To do this, we use several complementary methodologies. On the one hand, it will contribute to the visibilization of thermal flows and their effects in the territories. This work will be based on the quantification of these flows and their representation in the form of Sankey diagrams from the analysis of local energy data as well as on an experimental work of using video to diversify the vectors of information on the thermal metabolism. On the other hand, it will analyse the ongoing construction of new public policies on heating and cooling and their territorialization at the scale of four study areas (Grenoble, Lille, Lyon, Marseille). By crossing these approaches, the research will question the consequences of the emergence of new heating and cooling practices on the reorganisation of territories and local energy systems.

Epigenetics is more labile than genetics and mutates more rapidly. An important question in Evolutionary Biology is currently whether epigenetics participates in species adaptation. In this project, I offer to investigate how epigenetics may impact the evolution of separate sexes. In hermaphrodites, a compromise is reached between the female and male function, but, with separate sexes, sexual dimorphism can evolve and sexual antagonism may be resolved (traits advantageous for one sex but deleterious for the other can become sex-specific). I will focus on an epigenetic phenomenon called imprinting, where gene expression is biased for the maternal or the paternal copy. Imprinting has been observed in mammal and plant adult tissues and the evolutionary forces leading to imprinting in adults and its functions remain to be elucidated. A theoretical model proposed that sexual antagonism may lead to imprinting emergence. I propose to empirically this theory by comparing species with separate sexes to closely related hermaphrodite species (two independent species pairs). In a second aim, I will investigate if imprinting drives differential gene expression between sexes (called sex-biased expression). Sex-biased expression is a key phenomenon for the evolution of sexual dimorphism. Plants with separate sexes carry between 1 and 43% of sex-biased genes, but it is currently unknown how this is regulated. Finally, sex chromosomes have convergently evolved imprinting in organisms as diverged as marsupials and the plant S. latifolia, where the two Xs in females have different activity depending on their parental origin. In these organisms, X imprinting is linked to dosage compensation, a phenomenon that compensates for lower Y expression in males. I will investigate how the X imprint is regulated epigenetically in S. latifolia. The young sex chromosomes of S. latifolia may help us understand the early steps of dosage compensation evolution in the old mammalian sex chromosomes.