Publications associées à Host-derived organic acids enable gut colonization of the honey bee symbiont Snodgrassella alvi

Architecture of a decentralised decision support system for futuristic beehives

Francesco Mondada, Robert Thomas Edmund Mills, Robert Matthew Mills

Honeybees are essential to human society, providing pollination services globally as well as producing honey and other valuable products. Effective management of apiaries should not only rely on beekeeper knowledge and skill, but also incorporate new infor ...

2024

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

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

Stability of influenza A virus in droplets and aerosols is heightened by the presence of commensal respiratory bacteria

Tamar Kohn, Athanasios Nenes, Ghislain Gilles Jean-Michel Motos, Htet Kyi Wynn, Kalliopi Violaki, Céline Terrettaz, Aline Laetitia Schaub, Walter Hugentobler, Shannon Christa David, Laura José Costa Henriques

Aerosol transmission remains a major challenge for control of respiratory viruses, particularly those causing recurrent epidemics, like influenza A virus (IAV). These viruses are rarely expelled alone, but instead are embedded in a consortium of microorgan ...

American Society for Microbiology2024

A robotic honeycomb for interaction with a honeybee colony

Francesco Mondada, Robert Matthew Mills, Rafael Botner Barmak

Robotic technologies have shown the capability to interact with living organisms and even to form integrated mixed societies composed of living and artificial agents. Biocompatible robots, incorporating sensing and actuation capable of generating and respo ...

2023

The Effects of Spatial Organization and Fluid Flow on the Social Interactions in Microbial Communities

Jeremy Pak Hei Wong

Bacteria often engage in social interactions with neighbouring bacteria. Ecosystems which are subjected to social interactions have been widely studied in well mixed settings such as test tubes, allowing us to identify the cellular components contributing ...

EPFL2023

Energy-harnessing problem solving of primordial life: Modeling the emergence of catalytic host-nested parasite life cycles

Christian Iseli

All life forms on earth ultimately descended from a primordial population dubbed the last universal common ancestor or LUCA via Darwinian evolution. Extant living systems share two salient functional features, a metabolism extracting and transforming energ ...

2023

Biofilm morphogenesis on soft hydrogels

Alice Cont

Bacteria often colonize their environment in the form of surface attached multicellular communities called biofilms. Biofilms grow from surface-attached cells that undergo division while self-embedding in a viscoelastic matrix. Biofilms grow at the surface ...

EPFL2023

Symbiotic nutrient exchange enhances the long-term survival of cassiosomes, the autonomous stinging-cell structures of Cassiopea

Anders Meibom, Cristina Martin Olmos, Nils Rädecker, Claudia Isabella Pogoreutz, Guilhem Maurice Louis Banc-Prandi, Gaëlle Delphine Toullec, Niclas Heidelberg Lyndby

Medusae of the widely distributed upside-down jellyfish Cassiopea release autonomous, mobile stinging structures. These so-called cassiosomes play a role in predator defense and prey capture, and are major contributors to “contactless” stinging incidents i ...

2023