Isabelle Giraud

TL;DR: It is reported that somatic piRNAs were probably present in the ancestral arthropod more than 500 million years ago, calling into question the view that the ancestral role of the piRNA pathway was to protect the germline and demonstrating that small RNA silencing pathways have been repurposed for both somatic and germline functions throughout arthropods evolution.

TL;DR: Evidence is provided indicating that the genome of Wolbachia bacterial endosymbionts was horizontally transferred into a chromosome of the common pillbug Armadillidium vulgare, which resulted in this chromosome evolving as a new female (W) sex chromosome, which represents a remarkable mechanism underpinning the birth of sex chromosomes.

TL;DR: The results show that bacterial endosYmbionts with reduced genomes can sustain high loads of mobile group II introns, as hypothesized for the endosymbiont ancestor of mitochondria during early eukaryote evolution.

TL;DR: The sequence and analysis of the ZW female genome of A. vulgare shows that the Z and W sex chromosomes are essentially undifferentiated at the molecular level and the W-specific region is extremely small, and suggests that recombination suppression has not spread very far from the sex-determining locus.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors used 88 single-copy orthologous genes to reconstruct a fully resolved and dated phylogeny of terrestrial isopods, using an original approach involving crossings of sex-reversed individuals to characterize the heterogametic systems of five species (one XY/XX and four ZW/ZZ).