The 3rd Joint Congress on Evolutionary Biology was held in Montreal in July 2024. It is a huge scientific conference (17 sessions in parallel), regrouping European and North American Evolutionary Biology Societies every 4 years. Justine Bélik and Frédéric Silvestre presented their researches on the mangrove rivulus during the special symposium on Adaptive Epigenetics. For…
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Field trip 2024 in the Pyrenean
The summer 2024 pluridisciplinary field trip took 31 students from all scientific disciplines to the Pyrenean mountains, in South of France. It was the 3rd time that it was organized in this beautiful region, but it brought us new observations. This year, we had the opportunity to clearly observe several river otters in the river…
New research project in Ecuator
We are proud and happy to start a new collaboration with the Universidad Central del Ecuador, thanks to ARES-CCD starting grants: https://us15.campaign-archive.com/?e=__test_email__&u=c95463d02ed96d28ee34e579d&id=398cacc780 Our project aims to develop a populational epigenomic approach with a goal of conservation biology in this high biodiversity spot. More field missions in perspective !
LEAP was at Banyuls for the ECOBIM 2024 conference
After having organized the ECOBIM conference in Namur in 2022, the LEAP was present in Banyuls-sur-mer (La Sorbonne University) for the 2024 edition: https://ecobim.sciencesconf.org/. Julie Hetru presented a poster and a flash talk about her PhD project on turquoise killifish epigenetic clock and ecotoxicology, while Frederic Silvestre attended the meeting as a representative of the…
A new post-doc researcher at LEAP !
We are happy to welcome Dr Noëmie Guirandy as a post-doc researcher in the rivulus team. Noëmie has recently been graduated from the University of Aix-Marseille after a dissertation on the reprotoxicity of gamma irradiation on zebrafish. She will be working on long-term effects of pollutants on the mangrove rivulus and will initiate an evolutionary…
Frédéric has been reelected at the RBZS
After a first term of 2 years, Frédéric Silvestre has been reelected at the Presidency of the Royal Belgian Zoological Society for a second and last term. This scientific society was created in 1863 and is dedicated to put together scientists involved in animal research in its broadest sense, including evolutionary biology, behavioral ecology, conservation…
LEAP was at SICB annual conference !
Frédéric Silvestre was participating to the annual conference of the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology that was held in Seattle from 2nd to 6th of January 2024. It was the biggest SICB conference with more than 2000 oral presentations in fields like behavioral ecology, adaptive morphology or evolutionary physiology. Frederic gave a talk entitled:…
Congrats to Justine for her nomination at “Bauchau Award”
Our teaching assistant Justine Belik has showed all her scientific and pedagogic skills during the 2023 “Prix Adrien Bauchau” for the best master thesis. She unfortunately didn’t have the prize but did impress all the auditorium with her maturity. For sure she will have other awards !
PhD theses defenses
December is usually the month of the PhD theses defenses. Frédéric Silvestre was in the jury board of 3 excellent works in Namur, Brussels and Nantes. First, Mark Holmes has presented his work about stability modelling in a competitive community subject to environmental changes. He has been working in our research unit at UNamur under…
New FNRS project at LEAP
We are pleased to announce that the research project entitled “Epigenome stability in mangrove rivulus” has been funded by FNRS. It aims to assess the stability of DNA methylation over time in a highly homozygous and isogenic population of the mangrove rivulus, Kryptolebias marmoratus. It will address two major limitations of ecoepigenetic studies. Firstly, it…