The University of Geneva Faculties of Medicine and Science join their forces to offer an outstanding study and research environment in Life Sciences. Highly motivated students with a Master’s degree o...

Animal cells extensively remodel their cytoskeleton during differentiation and can notably switch between two major motility modes: flagellum-based swimming and actin-based crawling. We previously sho...

Chloroplast-stealing ciliates evolve, increasing reliance on their prey for all aspects of metabolism, including photosynthesis.

This study introduces iChIP2, a low-input chromatin immunoprecipitation followed by sequencing method that profiles histone post-translational modifications (hPTMs) simultaneously across diverse eukar...

Elucidating the biosynthesis of a unique nickel-containing conductive structure for long-range electron transport in cable bacteria

The Helsen lab at the University of Geneva explores how centromeres and chromosomes evolve, diversify, and function across eukaryotes. Discover our latest publications, research team, and open positio...

Multinucleate cells — single cells containing multiple nuclei in a shared cytoplasm — are found across the eukaryotic tree of life. Having evolved ind…

In a dividing cell, chromosome pairs are pulled apart thanks to attachment sites called centromeres. Yeast genomes reveal key steps in how centromeres have evolved. In a dividing cell, chromosome pairs are pulled apart thanks to attachment sites called centromeres. Yeast genomes reveal key steps in how centromeres have evolved.

Evolutionarily related ‘proto-point’ centromeres providing resolution to the evolutionary origins of point centromeres are identified in yeast, and comparison shows they evolved in an ancestor with re...

Imaging spotlight: U-ExM atlas of microbial eukaryotes - News

Accurate repair of DNA double-strand breaks (DSBs) is essential for genome stability, and defective repair underlies diseases such as cancer. Homologous recombination uses an intact homologous sequenc...

Thousands of centromeres were identified and tracked across two major fungal clades, showing that new centromeres spread progressively and that the kinetochore acts as a filter to determine which new centromere variants are tolerated.

Whole genome duplication (WGD) has had profound macroevolutionary impacts on diverse lineages, preceding adaptive radiations in vertebrates, teleost fish, and angiosperms. In contrast to the many know...

During cell division, chromosomes reorganise into compact bodies in which centromeres localise precisely at the chromatin surface to enable kinetochore-microtubule interactions essential for genome se...

Image processing methods offer the potential to improve the quality of fluorescence microscopy data, allowing for image acquisition at lower, less phototoxic illumination doses. The training and evalu...

Cells require highly polymorphic receptors to perform accurate self/non-self recognition. In the amoeba Dicytostelium discoideum, polymorphic TgrB1 & TgrC1 proteins are used to bind sister cells and e...

Picco et al. take an evolutionary approach to study clathrin-mediated endocytosis in a fungal clade and discover that the process is evolving in a mosaic fashion. The early phase of endocytosis has sh...

The evolutionary origins of the genetic point centromere in the brewer's yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae, a member of the order Saccharomycetales, are still unknown. Competing hypotheses suggest that t...

Autophagy-related proteins have roles in several cellular processes, but their function in genome stability remains unclear. Here, the authors show that Atg11 has an essential non-canonical function i...

Asgard archaea have two ESCRT-III subunits with the conserved traits that drive stepwise membrane remodeling in eukaryotes.

During mitosis, stable but dynamic interactions between the centromere DNA and kinetochore complex enable accurate and efficient chromosome segregation. Even though many proteins of the kinetochore ar...