Publications by authors named "Xavier Meyer"

Research Infrastructures (RIs) are strategic assets facilitating innovation and knowledge advancement across all scientific disciplines. They provide researchers with advanced tools and resources that go beyond individual or institutional capacities and promote collaboration, community-building and the application of scientific standards. Remote and virtual access to RIs enables scientists to use these essential resources without the necessity of being physically present.

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  • Environmental contamination, particularly in wetlands, significantly contributes to biodiversity loss, impacting species during critical development phases.
  • This study examined the effects of the herbicide nicosulfuron on spined toad tadpoles at various developmental stages, revealing that exposure led to larger size but altered body and tail muscle traits, increased activity, and changes in swimming speed and behavior.
  • Results indicated that higher concentrations of the herbicide correlated with more significant effects, and that the timing of exposure did not change the outcomes, highlighting the importance for regulators to address sublethal concentrations in environmental policies.
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  • Changes in marine ecosystems are more easily observed in predators like seabirds since they connect different levels of the food web.
  • A study on little penguins reveals that their diving behavior is affected by sea surface temperature and water stratification, impacting how efficiently they forage for food.
  • Penguins foraging in warmer, stratified waters displayed more complex diving patterns and higher foraging efficiency, indicating they adapt their strategies based on environmental conditions.
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The extinction of species can destabilize ecological processes. A way to assess the ecological consequences of species loss is by examining changes in functional diversity. The preservation of functional diversity depends on the range of ecological roles performed by species, or functional richness, and the number of species per role, or functional redundancy.

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Patterns of molecular coevolution can reveal structural and functional constraints within or among organic molecules. These patterns are better understood when considering the underlying evolutionary process, which enables us to disentangle the signal of the dependent evolution of sites (coevolution) from the effects of shared ancestry of genes. Conversely, disregarding the dependent evolution of sites when studying the history of genes negatively impacts the accuracy of the inferred phylogenetic trees.

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The study of molecular coevolution, due to its potential to identify gene regions under functional or structural constraints, has recently been subject to numerous scientific inquiries. Particular efforts have been conducted to develop methods predicting the presence of coevolution in molecular sequences. Among these methods, a few aim to model the underlying evolutionary process of coevolution, which enable to differentiate the shared history of genes to coevolution and thus improve their accuracy.

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The Southern Ocean is currently experiencing major environmental changes, including in sea-ice cover. Such changes strongly influence ecosystem structure and functioning and affect the survival and reproduction of predators such as seabirds. These effects are likely mediated by reduced availability of food resources.

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Motivation: Bayesian inference is widely used nowadays and relies largely on Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods. Evolutionary biology has greatly benefited from the developments of MCMC methods, but the design of more complex and realistic models and the ever growing availability of novel data is pushing the limits of the current use of these methods.

Results: We present a parallel Metropolis-Hastings (M-H) framework built with a novel combination of enhancements aimed towards parameter-rich and complex models.

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Background: Available methods to simulate nucleotide or amino acid data typically use Markov models to simulate each position independently. These approaches are not appropriate to assess the performance of combinatorial and probabilistic methods that look for coevolving positions in nucleotide or amino acid sequences.

Results: We have developed a web-based platform that gives a user-friendly access to two phylogenetic-based methods implementing the Coev model: the evaluation of coevolving scores and the simulation of coevolving positions.

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When crossing the road, pedestrians have to make a trade-off between saving time and avoiding any risk of injuries. Here, we studied how culture influences an individual's perception of risks when crossing a street, using survival analysis. This study is the first to use this analysis to assess cognitive mechanisms and optimality of decisions underlying road crossing behaviour.

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