Serge Aron

Bio: Serge Aron is an academic researcher from Université libre de Bruxelles. The author has contributed to research in topics: Cataglyphis & Population. The author has an hindex of 35, co-authored 152 publications receiving 6031 citations. Previous affiliations of Serge Aron include University of Texas at Austin & Centre national de la recherche scientifique.

The self-organizing exploratory pattern of the argentine ant

Abstract: Workers of the Argentine ant, Iridomyrmex humilis,start to explore a chemically unmarked territory randomly. As the exploratory front advances, other explorers are recruited and a trail extends from it to the nest. Whereas recruitment trails are generally constructed between two points, these exploratory trails have no fixed destination, and strongly resemble the foraging patterns of army ants. A minimal model shows how the exploratory pattern may be generated by the individual workers' simple trail-laying and -following behavior, illustrating how complex collective structures in insect colonies may be based on self-organization.

Self-organized Shortcuts in the Argentine Ant

Abstract: Les fourmis I. humilis choisissent le chemin le plus court pour aller de la colonie au lieu d'approvisionnement

Self-organization in social insects.

Abstract: Self-organization was introduced originally in the context of physics and chemistry to describe how microscopic processes give rise to macroscopic stuctures in out-of-equilibrium systems, Recent research that extends this concept to ethology suggests that it provides a concise description of a wide range of collective phenomena in animals, especially in social insects. This description does not rely on individual complexity to account for complex spatiotemporal features that emerge at the colony level, but rather assumes that intractions among simple individuals can produce highly structured collective behaviours.

Conditional use of sex and parthenogenesis for worker and queen production in ants.

Abstract: The near-ubiquity of sexual reproduction in animal species has long been considered a paradox because sexually reproducing individuals transmit only half of their genome to their progeny. Here, we show that the ant Cataglyphis cursor circumvents this cost by using alternative modes of reproduction for the production of reproductive and nonreproductive offspring. New queens are almost exclusively produced by parthenogenesis, whereas workers are produced by normal sexual reproduction. By selectively using sex for somatic growth and parthenogenesis for germline production, C. cursor has taken advantage of the ant caste system to benefit from the advantages of both sexual and asexual reproduction.

Thelytokous parthenogenesis and its consequences on inbreeding in an ant

Abstract: Thelytokous parthenogenesis, that is, the production of diploid daughters from unfertilized eggs, may involve various cytological mechanisms, each having a different impact on the genetic structure of populations. Here, we determined the cytological mechanism of thelytokous parthenogenesis and its impact on inbreeding in the ant Cataglyphis cursor, a species where queens use both sexual and asexual reproduction to produce, respectively, workers and new queens. It has been suggested that thelytokous parthenogenesis in C. cursor might have been selected for to face high queen mortality and, originally, to allow workers to replace the queen when she passes away. We first determined the mode of thelytokous parthenogenesis by comparing the rate of transition to homozygosity at four highly polymorphic loci to expectations under the different modes of parthenogenesis. Our data show that thelytoky is achieved through automictic parthenogenesis with central fusion. We then estimated the proportion of colonies headed by worker-produced queens in a natural population. We designed a model linking the observed homozygosity in queens to the proportion of queens produced by workers, based on the assumption that (i) parthenogenesis is automictic with central fusion and (ii) queen lineage is asexually produced, resulting in an increase of the inbreeding over generations, whereas workers are sexually produced and therefore not inbred. Our results indicate that more than 60% of the colonies should be headed by a worker-produced queen, suggesting that queen's lifespan is low in this species.

疟原虫var基因转换速率变化导致抗原变异[英]／Paul H, Robert P, Christodoulou Z, et al//Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A

Abstract: 抗原变异可使得多种致病微生物易于逃避宿主免疫应答。表达在感染红细胞表面的恶性疟原虫红细胞表面蛋白1（PfPMP1）与感染红细胞、内皮细胞、树突状细胞以及胎盘的单个或多个受体作用，在黏附及免疫逃避中起关键的作用。每个单倍体基因组var基因家族编码约60种成员，通过启动转录不同的var基因变异体为抗原变异提供了分子基础。

Genetic Programming: On the Programming of Computers by Means of Natural Selection

Abstract: Background on genetic algorithms, LISP, and genetic programming hierarchical problem-solving introduction to automatically-defined functions - the two-boxes problem problems that straddle the breakeven point for computational effort Boolean parity functions determining the architecture of the program the lawnmower problem the bumblebee problem the increasing benefits of ADFs as problems are scaled up finding an impulse response function artificial ant on the San Mateo trail obstacle-avoiding robot the minesweeper problem automatic discovery of detectors for letter recognition flushes and four-of-a-kinds in a pinochle deck introduction to biochemistry and molecular biology prediction of transmembrane domains in proteins prediction of omega loops in proteins lookahead version of the transmembrane problem evolutionary selection of the architecture of the program evolution of primitives and sufficiency evolutionary selection of terminals evolution of closure simultaneous evolution of architecture, primitive functions, terminals, sufficiency, and closure the role of representation and the lens effect Appendices: list of special symbols list of special functions list of type fonts default parameters computer implementation annotated bibliography of genetic programming electronic mailing list and public repository

Ant system: optimization by a colony of cooperating agents

Abstract: An analogy with the way ant colonies function has suggested the definition of a new computational paradigm, which we call ant system (AS). We propose it as a viable new approach to stochastic combinatorial optimization. The main characteristics of this model are positive feedback, distributed computation, and the use of a constructive greedy heuristic. Positive feedback accounts for rapid discovery of good solutions, distributed computation avoids premature convergence, and the greedy heuristic helps find acceptable solutions in the early stages of the search process. We apply the proposed methodology to the classical traveling salesman problem (TSP), and report simulation results. We also discuss parameter selection and the early setups of the model, and compare it with tabu search and simulated annealing using TSP. To demonstrate the robustness of the approach, we show how the ant system (AS) can be applied to other optimization problems like the asymmetric traveling salesman, the quadratic assignment and the job-shop scheduling. Finally we discuss the salient characteristics-global data structure revision, distributed communication and probabilistic transitions of the AS.

SPAdes, a new genome assembly algorithm and its applications to single-cell sequencing ( 7th Annual SFAF Meeting, 2012)

Abstract: The lion's share of bacteria in various environments cannot be cloned in the laboratory and thus cannot be sequenced using existing technologies. A major goal of single-cell genomics is to complement gene-centric metagenomic data with whole-genome assemblies of uncultivated organisms. Assembly of single-cell data is challenging because of highly non-uniform read coverage as well as elevated levels of sequencing errors and chimeric reads. We describe SPAdes, a new assembler for both single-cell and standard (multicell) assembly, and demonstrate that it improves on the recently released E+V-SC assembler (specialized for single-cell data) and on popular assemblers Velvet and SoapDeNovo (for multicell data). SPAdes generates single-cell assemblies, providing information about genomes of uncultivatable bacteria that vastly exceeds what may be obtained via traditional metagenomics studies. SPAdes is available online ( http://bioinf.spbau.ru/spades ). It is distributed as open source software.

Ant colony system: a cooperative learning approach to the traveling salesman problem

Abstract: This paper introduces the ant colony system (ACS), a distributed algorithm that is applied to the traveling salesman problem (TSP). In the ACS, a set of cooperating agents called ants cooperate to find good solutions to TSPs. Ants cooperate using an indirect form of communication mediated by a pheromone they deposit on the edges of the TSP graph while building solutions. We study the ACS by running experiments to understand its operation. The results show that the ACS outperforms other nature-inspired algorithms such as simulated annealing and evolutionary computation, and we conclude comparing ACS-3-opt, a version of the ACS augmented with a local search procedure, to some of the best performing algorithms for symmetric and asymmetric TSPs.