Section: Overall Objectives

Highlights of the Year

• The Beagle Team has been granted an FP7 project (FET Proactive “Evolving Living Technologies” call). The EvoEvo (“Evolution of Evolution”) project connects five european teams working in evolutionary biology (D. Schneider, UJF, France; S. Elena, CSIC, Spain; Beagle, Inria, France), computational biology (P. Hogeweg, Utrecht University, Nederland; Beagle, Inria, France) and unconventional computing (S. Stepney, University of York, UK; Beagle, Inria, France). EvoEvo has been launched at the initiative of the Beagle Team who leads the project. Total amount funded: 2.6 Million euros. Amount funded for Inria : 800.000 euros.

• We organized the international conference “RECOMB Comparative Genomics” in October 2013, in Lyon and the international conference “Models and Algorithms for Genome Evolution” in August 2013 in Montreal, Canada. Following the latter conference, we co-edited a book published in the “Computational biology” series of Springer [37] .

• Our long-lasting collaboration with the BM2A team of the CGphyMC (Centre de Génétique et de Physiologie Moléculaire et Cellulaire) is based on co-development of experimental work in the “wet lab” of the CGphyMC and computational experiments in the “dry lab” of Beagle. By using this approach to investigate the molecular basis of the stochasticity of gene expression in higher eukaryotic cells, we have been able to show that this stochasticity is due to intermittent transcription events with very long periods of quiet states. These results have been published in a high impact biological journal in February 2013 [12] .

• Our work on the signalling pathways implicated in synaptic plasticity, initiated in 2012 [34] and carried out in collaboration with the experimental neurobiology lab led by L. Venance at Collège de France, Paris, became a major project for Beagle in 2013, with the recruitment of I. Prokin (PhD, Inria grant) and the extension of the collaboration to the group of A. Blackwell (Georges Mason University, USA). Respective publications and funded projects are expected for 2014.

• The project related to the study of intracellular reaction-diffusion dynamics of signalling pathways started to develop in 2013 a more mathematical direction. This is carried out with Beagle and S. Fedotov (School Mathematics, Univ. Manchester, UK), V. Calvez (Inria Numed, Lyon), T. Lepoutre (Inria Dracula, Lyon) and Master student A. Mateos-Gonzalez (ENS Lyon, Mathematics).