BILLARD , Bénédicte

Adaptive developmental plasticity is a common phenomenon across diverse organisms and allows a single genotype to express multiple phenotypes in response to environmental signals. Developmental plasticity is thus thought to reflect a key adaptation to cope with heterogenous habitats. Adaptive plasticity often relies on highly regulated...

Environmental signals often control central life history decisions, including the choice between reproduction and somatic maintenance. Such adaptive developmental plasticity occurs in the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans, where environmental cues govern whether larvae will develop directly into reproducing adults or arrest their development to...

Abstract To study how natural allelic variation explains quantitative developmental system variation, we characterized natural differences in germ stem cell niche activity, measured as progenitor zone (PZ) size, between two Caenorhabditis elegans isolates. Linkage mapping yielded candidate loci on chromosomes II and V, and we found that the...

Take away points:-Conventional methods for obtaining heterothallic fission yeast strains are inefficient-We implemented a streamlined genetic editing approach to engineer heterothallism-All fission yeast isolates reported in Jeffares et al. 2015 can be engineered-This method enhances the exploration of genetic diversity in wild fission yeast

In poor nitrogen conditions, fission yeast cells mate, undergo meiosis and form spores that are resistant to deleterious environments. Natural isolates of Schizosaccharomyces pombe are homothallic. This allows them to naturally switch between the two h− and h+ mating types with a high frequency, thereby ensuring the presence of both mating...