KOUTSOVOULOS , Georgios

We present tournament results and several powerful strategies for the Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma created using reinforcement learning techniques (evolutionary and particle swarm algorithms). These strategies are trained to perform well against a corpus of over 170 distinct opponents, including many well-known and classic strategies. All the...

Halicephalobus is a clade of small, exclusively parthenogenic nematodes that have sometimes colonized remarkable habitats. Given their phylogenetic closeness to other parthenogenic panagrolaimid species with which they likely share a sexually reproducing ancestor, Halicephalobus species provide a point of comparison for parallel-isms in the...

Horizontal gene transfer (HGT) is the transfer of genes between species outside the transmission from parent to offspring. Due to their impact on the genome and biology of various species, HGTs have gained broader attention, but high-throughput methods to robustly identify them are lacking. One rapid method to identify HGT candidates is to...

Plant-parasitic nematodes are a costly burden of crop production. Ubiquitous in nature, phytoparasitic nematodes are associated with nearly every important agricultural crop and represent a significant constraint on global food security. Population genetics is a key discipline in plant nematology to understand aspects of the life strategies of...

During the last decades, metagenomics has highlighted the diversity of microorganisms from environmental or host-associated samples. Most metagenomics public repositories use annotation pipelines tailored for prokaryotes regardless of the taxonomic origin of contigs. Consequently, eukaryotic contigs with intrinsically different gene features,...

Dirofilaria repens is a zoonotic, mosquito-borne filaria infecting carnivores, particularly dogs. It is expanding its range in Europe but epidemiological information is sparse for other Eurasian regions. In Hong Kong and India, the closely related species Candidatus Dirofilaria hongkongensis was proposed. Previous analysis of 2.5 kb partial...

Root-knot nematodes (genus Meloidogyne) are plant parasites causing huge economic loss in the agricultural industry and affecting severely numerous developing countries. Control methods against these plant pests are sparse, the preferred one being the deployment of plant cultivars bearing resistance genes against Meloidogyne species. However,...

Discovered in the 1960s,Meloidogyne graminicolais a root-knot nematode species considered as a major threat to rice production. Yet, its origin, genomic structure, and intraspecific diversity are poorly understood. So far, such studies have been limited by the unavailability of a sufficiently complete and well-assembled genome. In this study,...

The evolution of development has been studied through the lens of gene regulation by examining either closely related species or extremely distant animals of different phyla. In nematodes, detailed cell-and stage-specific expression analyses are focused on the model Caenorhabditis elegans, in part leading to the view that the developmental...

Root-knot nematodes (genus Meloidogyne) are plant parasitic species that cause huge economic loss in the agricultural industry and affect the prosperity of communities in developing countries. Control methods against these plant pests are sparse and the current preferred method is deployment of plant cultivars bearing resistance genes against...

The root‐knot nematodes are the most devastating worms to worldwide agriculture with Meloidogyne incognita being the most widely distributed and damaging species. This parasitic and ecological success seems surprising given its supposed obligatory clonal reproduction. Clonal reproduction has been suspected based on cytological observations but,...

Abstract Using long-read sequencing, we assembled and unzipped the polyploid genomes of Meloidogyne incognita , M. javanica and M. arenaria , three of the most devastating plant-parasitic nematodes. We found the canonical nematode telomeric repeat to be missing in these and other Meloidogyne genomes. In addition, we find no evidence for the...

Abstract Plant-parasitic nematodes are a major threat to crop production in all agricultural systems. The scarcity of classical resistance genes highlights a pressing need to find new ways to develop nematode-resistant germplasm. Here, we sequence and assemble a high-quality phased genome of the model cyst nematode Heterodera schachtii to...