Éditeur(s) : HAL CCSD
Résumé : International audience
This paper investigates the narrative challenges and opportunities that contemporary virology offers to popular science and to fiction. The study of viruses reveals extremely complex relations, playing out over different physical and temporal scales. Viruses constitute a heterogeneous population whose interactions with living organisms occur on multiple levels, and whose numbers are vastly superior to human and even bacterial populations on earth. The resulting challenges for narration can be grouped into three main formal questions. The first is the problem of scale, since the numbers and sizes of virus and host populations are vastly different, as are the temporalities over which they transform and survive. The second is the complexity of actants, since viruses are involved in relations where destruction and mutual benefit can overlap, and genetic transformations are played out over many generations. The third is the choice of images through which to convey their behaviours: many existing metaphors in microbiology, such as “chimeras”, “parasites” or “kill-the-winner dynamics”, carry the narrative potential of a mythological and/or theatrical imagination.These questions will first be examined as challenges encountered in the narration of biology for vulgarization purposes, and effects on narrative forms will be outlined: shifts in focalization in order to create multiscalar perspectives; unstable actantial models as expressions of complex relations; and the use or resistance to narrative structures implied by several key metaphors in virological discourse. These formal characteristics will then be presented through two case studies drawn from contemporary fiction. In his “scientific fable” Conflits Intérieurs (2015), microbiologist Eric Bapteste creates a multiscalar narrative by using humans and viruses as both protagonists and narrators in a battle of ideas. In the graphic novel aâma (2011-2014), Frederik Peeters explores the ambiguous potential, both symbiotic and threatening, of a meta-organism uniting humans with microscopic agents. Both these novels play with scale, metaphor and actants so as to question the fundaments of human identity. They posit the act of narration as a defining human attribute, and consequently use the narrative voice as an arena in which we observe the weakening of the notion of the subject by microbiology.
“Narrative, Cognition & Science” Symposium
Erlangen, Germany

hal-01434744
https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01434744

Éditeur(s) : HAL CCSD Society for Molecular Biology and Evolution
Résumé : International audience
Complex nongradual evolutionary processes such as gene remodeling are difficult to model, to visualize, and to investigate systematically. Despite these challenges, the creation of composite (or mosaic) genes by combination of genetic segments from unrelated gene families was established as an important adaptive phenomena in eukaryotic genomes. In contrast, almost no general studies have been conducted to quantify composite genes in viruses. Although viral genome mosaicism has been well-described, the extent of gene mosaicism and its rules of emergence remain largely unexplored. Applying methods from graph theory to inclusive similarity networks, and using data from more than 3,000 complete viral genomes, we provide the first demonstration that composite genes in viruses are 1) functionally biased, 2) involved in key aspects of the arm race between cells and viruses, and 3) can be classified into two distinct types of composite genes in all viral classes. Beyond the quantification of the widespread recombination of genes among different viruses of the same class, we also report a striking sharing of genetic information between viruses of different classes and with different nucleic acid types. This latter discovery provides novel evidence for the existence of a large and complex mobilome network, which appears partly bound by the sharing of genetic information and by the formation of composite genes between mobile entities with different genetic material. Considering that there are around 10E31 viruses on the planet, gene remodeling appears as a hugely significant way of generating and moving novel sequences between different kinds of organisms on Earth.
ISSN: 1759-6653

Droits : http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/
hal-01324848
http://hal.upmc.fr/hal-01324848
http://hal.upmc.fr/hal-01324848/document
http://hal.upmc.fr/hal-01324848/file/Genome%20Biol%20Evol-2014-Jachiet-2195-205.pdf
DOI : 10.1093/gbe/evu168

Éditeur(s) : HAL CCSD Oxford University Press (OUP)
Résumé : International audience
DNA sequencing technology is becoming more accessible to a variety of researchers as costs continue to decline. As researchers begin to sequence novel transcriptomes, most of these data sets lack a reference genome and will have to rely on de novo assemblers. Making comparisons across assemblies can be difficult: each program has its strengths and weaknesses, and no tool exists to comparatively evaluate these data sets. We developed software in R, called Sequence Comparative Analysis using Networks (SCAN), to perform statistical comparisons between distinct assemblies. SCAN uses a reference data set to identify the most accurate de novo assembly and the ``good'' transcripts in the user's data. We tested SCAN on three publicly available transcriptomes, each assembled using three assembly programs. Moreover, we sequenced the transcriptome of the oomycete Achlya hypogyna and compared de novo assemblies from Velvet, ABySS, and the CLC Genomics Workbench assembly algorithms. One thousand one hundred twenty-eight of the CLC transcripts were statistically similar to the reference, compared with 49 of the Velvet transcripts and 937 of the ABySS transcripts. SCAN's strength is providing statistical support for transcript assemblies in a biological context. However, SCAN is designed to compare distinct node sets in networks, therefore it can also easily be extended to perform statistical comparisons on any network graph regardless of what the nodes represent.
ISSN: 0737-4038

hal-01544800
https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01544800
DOI : 10.1093/molbev/mst087