Actualités 2019

Publication from LBMC, IBENS and Isyeb in Science on March 15, 2019. In the Mesorhabditis belari roundworm, the sole purpose of males is to help females produce clones of themselves. This unique form of reproduction was recently described by researchers from the CNRS, l'ENS de Lyon, l'Université Claude Bernard Lyon 1, and the Muséum national d'Histoire naturelle in an article published on 15 March 2019 .

Grown throughout the world, F1 hybrid crop varieties have highly desirable traits. However, they remain expensive to produce. This situation may be about to change. By modifying the expression of certain genes, INRA researchers have created hybrid rice plants whose seeds give rise to offspring that are identical to the mother plant.

Publication from the IGFL in Current Biology on April 1st, 2019. The genome, which corresponds to the whole DNA content of a cell and is characteristic of an organism, can present big variations in size between species. If this size does not correlate with organismal "complexity", it is not clearly established yet if bigger or smaller genomes could be adaptive.