Publications related to Oral transfer of chemical cues, growth proteins and hormones in social insects

Targeted worker removal reveals a lack of flexibility in brood transport specialisation with no compensatory gain in efficiency

Mahmut Selman Sakar, Laurent Keller, Fazil Emre Uslu

Division of labour is widely thought to increase the task efficiency of eusocial insects. Workers can switch their task to compensate for sudden changes in demand, providing flexible task allocation. In combination with automated tracking technology, we de ...

Nature Research2024

Nanostructure and Optical Property Tailoring of Zinc Tin Nitride Thin Films through Phenomenological Decoupling: A Pathway to Enhanced Control

Aïcha Hessler-Wyser, Johann Michler, Amit Sharma, Caroline Hain, Daniele Casari, Thomas Nelis

This work addresses the need for precise control of thin film sputtering processes to enable thin film material tailoring on the example of zinc tin nitride (ZTN) thin films deposited via microwave plasma-assisted high power reactive magnetron sputtering ( ...

Amer Chemical Soc2024

A Biohybrid Superorganism - Investigating honeybees' collective behaviors via interactive robotics

Rafael Botner Barmak

Social insects, such as ants, termites, and honeybees, have evolved sophisticated societies where the collaborative efforts of "simple" individuals can lead to the emergence of complex dynamics. The reliance of each organism on the collective is so great t ...

EPFL2024

Biohybrid Superorganisms—On the Design of a Robotic System for Thermal Interactions With Honeybee Colonies

Francesco Mondada, Robert Matthew Mills, Rafael Botner Barmak, Raphael Cherfan

Social insects, such as ants, termites, and honeybees, have evolved sophisticated societies where collaboration and division of labor enhance survival of the whole colony, and are thus considered “superorganisms”. Historically, studying behaviors involving ...

2024

Innovative Biomarkers for Obesity and Type 1 Diabetes Based on Bifidobacterium and Metabolomic Profiling

Stephan Morgenthaler, Paul Refinetti, Mariya Yuryevna Skvortsova

The role of Bifidobacterium species and microbial metabolites such as short-chain fatty acids (SCFAs) and human milk oligosaccharides in controlling intestinal inflammation and the pathogenesis of obesity and type 1 diabetes (T1D) has been largely studied ...

MDPI2024

Controlled Formation of Nanoribbons and Their Heterostructures via Assembly of Mass-Selected Inorganic Ions

Klaus Kern

Control of nanomaterial dimensions with atomic precision through synthetic methods is essential to understanding and engineering of nanomaterials. For single-layer inorganic materials, size and shape controls have been achieved by self-assembly and surface ...

Wiley-V C H Verlag Gmbh2024

Anomalous dissipation and other non-smooth phenomena in fluids

Massimo Sorella

The thesis is dedicated to the study of two main partial differential equations (PDEs) in fluid dynamics: the Navier-Stokes equations, which describe the motion of incompressible fluids, and the transport equation with divergence-free velocity fields, whic ...

EPFL2024

New Approach for the Identification of Isobaric and Isomeric Metabolites

Thomas Rizzo, Ahmed Ben Faleh, Stephan Warnke, Ali H Abikhodr, Teun Van Wieringen

The structural elucidation of metabolite molecules is important in many branches of the life sciences. However, the isomeric and isobaric complexity of metabolites makes their identification extremely challenging, and analytical standards are often require ...

2023

Advancing Glycan Analysis: Cryogenic Ion Spectroscopy for Database-Driven Identification

Ali H Abikhodr

Glycans play a pivotal role in both physiological processes; however, the field of glycobiology remains relatively understudied within biochemistry. The intricate complexity of glycans, coupled with their abundance of isomeric forms, presents formidable ch ...

EPFL2023

Combining ion mobility spectrometry and cryogenic ion spectroscopy with enzymatic digestion/synthesis for the study of N-linked glycans

Irina Märki

Glycans play an essential role in numerous physiological and pathological processes of living organisms. Despite their significant biological relevance, glycobiology remains one of the least explored fields of biochemistry. The intrinsic isomeric complexit ...

EPFL2023