Section: Highlights of the Year

Highlights of the Year

Biotechnology

In collaboration with MIAT INRA and UMR 5234 CNRS/Université de Bordeaux, Pleiade assembled and analyzed Clavispora lusitaniae, an ubiquist environmental ascomycetous yeast that can be pathogenic and is responsible for invasive candidiases in pediatric and onco-haematology patients [24].

In collaboration with UMR 5200 CNRS/Université de Bordeaux, Pleiade assembled and analyzed transcriptomes from three tissues of the oil palm tree Elaeis guineensis Jacq., whose mesocarp contains oil up to 90% of its dry weight. Our goal is to increase, by synthetic biology approaches, the yield in oil for crops grown in Europe. The yield and the composition of oil measured from wild-type palm tree specimens varies dramatically, indicating a high level of bio-diversity.

Biodiversity

Pleiade and the HiePACS team developed connections between random projection methods and multi-dimensional scaling, in order to compute eigenvectors and eigenvelaues in space of reasonable dimension. The method for MDS developed by Pierre Blanchard has proved to be surprisingly efficient and precise. It was presented at PASC 2016 Lausanne. This work improves the analysis of microbial communities, where the shape of the point cloud built from pairwise distances between a large set of NGS reads is used to describe the diversity of the community.