Pierre Bourguet

Congratulations the first story from your lab Marco! To all co-authors and to Gesa for the stunning pictures 😍

AGO5 restricts virus vertical transmission in plant gametophytes The propagation of a viral infection from a host parent to its progeny is known as vertical transmission, or seed transmission in plants. It allows viral infections to rapidly spread locally via polle...

Preprint alert! It is my great pleasure to announce the first manuscript from the lab, a story that started @gmivienna.bsky.social and was mainly accomplished by the intrepid @gesahoffmann.bsky.social at @mpi-mp-potsdam.bsky.social. A brief thread with our findings
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Have you ever wondered how it is possible that systemically infected plants produce (a certain percentage of) healthy progeny? 💚

Check out the first preprint of the @incavirus.bsky.social lab and first preprint of my postdoc! 🍀

We'd be very happy about feedback and discussions!

Rapid compensatory evolution within a multiprotein complex preserves telomere integrity Intragenomic conflict with selfish genetic elements spurs adaptive changes in subunits of essential multiprotein complexes. Whether and how these adaptive changes disrupt interactions within such comp...

How to keep in step when your (protein) partner speeds up…

Here we investigated the adaptive remodeling of a protein-protein interaction surface essential for telomere protection.

Congrats to whole team!

www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

A synthetic bacterium that degrades and assimilates poly(ethylene terephthalate) Polyethylene terephthalate (PET) is the fourth most commonly used plastic worldwide. Like all plastics, post-consumer PET is poorly managed and accumulates in the environment, posing significant ecolo...

Paper alert!
We have created a bacterium that eats plastic! We named it PETBuster! Great work by PhD student Dekel Freund @dekel-freund.bsky.social.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

New preprint from our group led by @metalichen.bsky.social on the discovery of a Starship giant transposable element in the genome of a lichen-forming fungus.

Super interesting work!

Adenine DNA methylation associated with transcriptionally permissive chromatin is widespread across eukaryotes - Nature Genetics Long-read sequencing in 18 unicellular eukaryotes reveals that 6mA is widespread across eukaryotes and is enriched at transcriptionally permissive regions, which are also marked by H3K4me3.

Out today, our take on 6-methyladenine #6mA evolution in Eukaryotes @natgenet.nature.com. We asked a simple question, is really DNA 6mA common across the eukaryotes? The answer is "yes" if you're a unicellular eukaryote 🦠, not so if you're multicellular 🐝🌱🍄. www.nature.com/articles/s41... 1/9

Still looking for our perfect doctoral candidate as part of @evomg-dn.bsky.social - come and join us to work on the evolutionary pressures that shape gene expression and disease in the uterus!

Please RT (or is it RB? not sure how our lingo has changed!)

Recurrent acquisition of nuclease-protease pairs in antiviral immunity Antiviral immune systems diversify by integrating new genes into existing pathways, creating new mechanisms of viral resistance. We identified genes encoding a predicted nuclease paired with a trypsin...

Our nuclease-protease story is out! We explored a fascinating case of coevolution and modularity in prokaryotic immune systems: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Thanks to wonderful coauthors/collaborators/friends, the whole @doudna-lab.bsky.social and everyone at @innovativegenomics.bsky.social

Young KRAB-zinc finger gene clusters are highly dynamic incubators of ERV-driven genetic heterogeneity in mice - Nature Communications KRAB-zinc finger proteins repress retrotransposons and rapidly evolve in mammals. Here, the authors show that ERV insertions drive the emergence and diversification of new KZFP genes in mice, revealin...

Having a lot of fun at #EMBOMobileGenome 😃
Perfect timing for our paper from the lab of @toddmacfarlan.bsky.social to be out @natcomms.nature.com!!

…and I’m currently on the job market looking for a new scientific home!

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Thank you for the kind words! We definitely overlooked that association in humans. Cool that CDCA7/CDCA7L variants are also associated with increased expression and CG methylation. Mechanistically, I'm curious to see how the CG-dominated function of plant CDCA7 will compare in animals!

Thank you Olivier!

Thank you James

Bacteria sense virus-induced genome degradation via methylated mononucleotides Phages often degrade the genome of their bacterial host to individual nucleotides and use these nucleotides to build their own genome. In this study, we describe a bacterial defense system that direct...

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

@soreklab.bsky.social Sorek lab does it again! Such a cool signal to specifically detect the event of genome degradation by a phage

This paper coming out today is a beautiful way for me to close up the #EMBOmobilegenome in Heidelberg. Great crowd, great talks, great things ahead! Shoutout to the organizers for putting this together 👏

#TEworldwide #TEsky
#Epigenetics #plantscience

Some impressions from the rather fabulous #EMBOmobilegenome Mobile Genome meeting in Heidelberg
Morning walk through the woods, exciting panel discussion, flash talks, lab community, drosophila friends, …
@events.embl.org

The transposon community is going very strong. see you all again in 2027!!

and the link to the paper:
nature.com/articles/s41...

Finally I want to thank all co-authors who contributed, the support at the GMI & VBCF, and reviewers who improved the paper.

doi.org/10.7554/eLif...
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
doi.org/10.1093/nar/...
doi.org/10.1126/scia...
doi.org/10.1126/scia...
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

I believe our study brings important insights into CDCA7’s relationship to DDM1 / HELLS and should be relevant in the context of recent papers on CDCA7 (links below).

This model fits with two published observations:
- CDCA7 zinc-finger domain binds hemi-methylated CG sites (which are created at replication forks) and prefers nucleosomal DNA over linker DNA.
- While most eukaryotes have HELLS / DDM1, lineages that lost DNA methylation also lost CDCA7.

To conclude, we propose a model of epigenetic inheritance where DDM1 functions are temporally separated during DNA replication, and CDCA7 predominantly promotes mCG maintenance, with minimal contribution to other DDM1 functions.

The worldwide distribution of CDCA7α alleles suggests it may contribute to local adaptation. We found these alleles correlate with an altitudinal cline in the mountains of Spain and are associated with changes in seed size, an adaptive trait for plants.

In natural populations, a 26-bp indel in the CDCA7α promoter acts as a rheostat, tuning its expression. This polymorphism affects the level of CG methylation and transposon silencing across the entire genome.

Quantitatively, CDCA7 disproportionately impacts mCG, indicating the predominant function of CDCA7 is to promote DDM1-dependent mCG. An important detail here is that we used ratios of mutant / WT to objectively compare methylation contexts.

We also mapped the physical interaction, showing the N-terminal domain of CDCA7α binds directly to the H2A.W-binding domain of DDM1.

The absence of CDCA7 has a weaker impact than DDM1 mutations, showing DDM1 can partially act without CDCA7. Conversely, we provide lots of genetic evidence that CDCA7 function exclusively through the DDM1 pathway.

We show that two A. thaliana genes, CDCA7α and CDCA7ß, redundantly contribute to all known DDM1 functions in heterochromatin maintenance. cdca7α/ß mutants phenocopy ddm1 mutants, affecting DNA methylation, histone variants and PTMs.