Section: Partnerships and Cooperations

International Initiatives

Inria International Partners

Informal International Partners

• Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL). We collaborate with Marion Leleu and Jacques Rougemont of the Bioinformatics and Biostatistics Core Facility of the EPFL. The general objective of this exploratory work is to investigate the relationships between epigenetic profiles and 3D structure of the genome. More precisely, we currently compare the clustering of DNA intervals based on descriptors computed from epigenetic profiles in two cases: with and without making use of information about the 3D structure of the genome. We have co-supervised a Master student (Duc Thanh Phan) in 2012-2013 on this topic.

Participation In other International Programs

Research Networks Program of the High Council for Scientific and Technological Cooperation between France-Israel: Astrocytic regulation of neuronal network activity (2012-2013)

The specific objectives of this joint project with groups from Tel Aviv University are to determine the properties of astrocytic calcium wave propagation and to reveal how astrocyte signals dynamically affect synaptic information transfer, thus regulating neuronal network activity. To this aim, we combine theoretical and experimental investigations of small neuron-glial networks.

Beagle (H. Berry) is coordinator of the project for the French side and supervises the modeling aspects. The coordinator for the Israeli group is Pr. Y. Hanein (Tel Aviv University Institute for Nanoscience and Nanotechnology, http://nano.tau.ac.il/hanein ), who is responsible for the experimental parts. The other partner is Pr. E. Ben-Jacob (School of Physics and Astronomy, Tel Aviv University, http://tamar.tau.ac.il/~eshel/EBJG/ ). The project also gathers 4 PhD or Master students in Tel Aviv and Lyon.

Total amount funded : 160 k€.

ANR/NSF Bilateral programme for Collaborative Research in Computational Neuroscience (CRCNS): Modelling the vocal apparatus of birds (2013-2016)

This joint project with F. Theunissen (UC Berkeley, USA) aims at modelling the vocal apparatus of birds (Zebra Finches) to recreate vocal range of this bird using a sparser representation than the spectrum. This new representation can be used as a new parameter space to test acoustic neural coding.

This collaboration has been granted by ANR/NSF Bilateral program for Collaborative Research in Computational Neuroscience (CRCNS)(CRCNS 2012), which promotes collaborations between French and American teams. Beagle (H. Soula) is coordinator of the project for the French side and supervises the modeling aspects.

France Berkeley Fund: User-friendly phylogenomics: Bayesian simultaneous reconstruction of gene trees and species trees

We obtained a grant for a common project with J. Huelsenbeck's lab (UC Berkeley, USA) on the development of probabilistic models of genome and sequence evolution to simultaneously reconstruct gene trees and species trees, and thus study how species and their genomes have changed through time.