Let’s introduce Dr. Stéphane Boissinot to our audience! Who are you? If you had to describe yourself in 1 sentence, what would you say?

I define myself both as an evolutionary biologist and as an educator. I grew up in a small village in France and my parents’ house was close to swamps. I spent my childhood catching frogs, snakes and lizards and I became fascinated by their diversity. Becoming an evolutionary biologist was thus a logical path for me. I also care deeply in transmitting my passion for evolution to younger generations and in particular to expose students to field work, which is the best place to come up with new research ideas.

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What are the most

A- Fascinating research

B- Impactful research

C- Fun and whimsical research

You are leading these days?

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Fascinating research: For the past 30 years I have been investigating the evolutionary relationship between genomes and intra-genomic parasites. Genomes, including our own, are the stage of an extremely old genetic conflict between transposable elements, which are DNA sequences that have the ability to selfishly multiply in the genome, and their host, which evolved mechanisms to repress these elements and maintain genomic integrity. This conflict has profoundly affected the size, structure and function of all genomes. My personal contribution has been on understanding how natural selection and the history of populations have shaped the abundance and distribution of these elements.‍

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Impactful research: We have been investigating the adaptation of invasive species to the environment of the UAE to better understand how organisms can adapt to a rapidly changing environment. The UAE is a prime location to investigate how organisms adapt to an environment that is extreme in terms of temperature and aridity. The global increase in temperatures suggests that the conditions currently found in the UAE could be experienced in the near future around the Mediterranean basin, in Central Asia, in Sub-Saharan Africa, and in the American South West. It remains unknown how, and if, organisms will adapt to the massive increase in temperatures and aridity expected across the globe, especially over the short time scale predicted by climate change models. A possible approach to address this question is to study species that have rapidly colonized extreme environment, such as the UAE. These invasive populations encounter novel biotic and abiotic selective pressures and we expect to observe evolutionary responses to occur over the same time scale predicted by climate change models. From these studies, we expect to make prediction about the adaptability of organisms to climate change and possibly to identify the biological processes at play.

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Fun and whimsical research: We are currently investigating the evolution of traits that have evolved repeatedly, with the goal of understanding the role played by natural selection and genomic architecture in determining the repeatability of those traits. We have focused our effort on the evolution of two traits that I find fascinating: the presence of horns in vipers and color polymorphism in frogs. In both cases we determined that ecology was driving the evolution of these traits but we have uncovered a variety of molecular mechanisms by which these traits evolved.

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4 years ago, you launched the Artist-in-Residence program in the Center for Genomics and Systems Biology at NYUAD. What inspired a biologist to bring artists into the lab… and what unexpected things came out of it?

The idea of bringing an artist-in-residence to the Center for Genomics and Systems Biology comes from the environment in which I work, New York University Abu Dhabi, where interdisciplinarity is encouraged at all level. I was curious to explore how an artistic perspective can feed the creativity of scientists and make us think differently about our science. Another goal of these artist-scientist collaborations was to develop new ways to visualize our scientific discoveries and to engage students and the public at large in a non-traditional way. As an educator, I realized that younger generations are learning differently than I was and that new approaches, either visual, musical or tactile, should be explored to convey scientific information. In this perspective, collaborating with artists can be very enlightening.

What I didn’t expect was the enthusiasm of colleagues, researchers and students in learning how artists and scientists can collaborate. People have opened the doors of their labs to the artists-in-residence and these collaborations have been both exciting and fruitful.

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The music of the genome? You and Sam Nester made it happen! But what was the science behind it?

Part of my research focuses on the impact of transposable elements on the structure and function of genomes. Large genomes, such as the human genome, are highly repetitive and these repetitive sequences are mostly derived from the activity of transposable elements. These elements vary in length, age, base composition and mode of transposition. When displayed using traditional visualization tools, these elements look like notes on a musical score. Sam Nester and I collaborated to transform this genomic information into musical as well as visual information. The result was beautiful and conveyed to the listener the message that the genome is the result of an age-old process of progressive changes mediated by the activity of transposable elements. Our pilot project was on a section of the human genome but the tools developed by Sam can be applied to any genome and it will be fascinating to listen to the genomic music of organisms as diverse as a tree, a frog, a fish or an insect.

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AI…AI…AI…is AI doing anything useful in your field of evolutionary biology?

In my field, evolutionary genomics, it is now possible to generate huge datasets by sequencing the entire genome of hundreds or thousands and soon millions of individuals. These datasets reflect both spatial (geography) and temporal complexity. Understanding the origin of this complexity requires the development of increasingly complex analyses that take into account the intrinsic properties of genomes such as variation in mutation rates or recombination rates. In this context, AI can be of great help in identifying patterns and in helping us make sense of these patterns. However, we are just at the beginning of the application of AI in my field and I expect many exciting results will come in the next few years.

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If you could design an experiment without any limitations of time or money…what would it be?

One of the big questions in evolutionary biology is how repeatable evolution is. I would design a large-scale experiment, on multiple species across the tree of life, where a large number of experimental populations would be exposed to the same environmental conditions (for instance conditions that mimic climate change) to determine if the same molecular pathways or the same genes are involved in adaptation to a new environment.

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If you could have a superhero power. What would it be?

I would like to be invisible to sit in a forest and observe what animals are doing in the complete absence of human interference. Remote sensing can inform us about what happens in nature when we are not there, but being there myself, invisible, would be an amazing sensory experience.

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Mystery dinner party…Dead or Alive, who would be 3 guests you would invite to your dinner party?

As a French person, dinner is all about the food and the best dinner conversations are about food and wine. My guests will be Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin (the author of the “Physiology of taste”, one of the first gastronomy essay), Auguste Escoffier (who codified French haute cuisine) and Julia Child (who brought the art of French cooking to the US).