Fabienne Aujard

French National Centre for Scientific Research | CNRS

Deslorelin is a GnRH agonist used in veterinary medicine to temporarily inhibit reproduction in domestic animals and is sometimes tested in captive species in zoo to control population or tame aggressive behaviours in males. However, some studies have revealed the inefficacy of deslorelin specifically in males, contrary to females that follow a cla...

The thrifty female hypothesis states that females would preserve more of their energy reserves during winter than males, because of a sex specific time-frame of energy allocation to reproduction. As males reactivate their reproductive axis before the mating period, while females mainly allocate energy in gestation and lactation, we make the hypothe...

Biomimicry is a growing field of developing environmental innovations for materials, facade systems, buildings, and urban planning. In France, we observe an extensive diversity of initiatives in biomimicry for the development of regenerative cities. These initiatives blossom in a large range of areas, from education to urban policies, to achieve a...

Living envelopes, such as biological skins and structures built by animals, are functional and sustainable designs resulting from years of evolution, conditioned by biological and physical pressures from the environment. When building a home, animals demonstrate inspiring strategies to protect themselves from predator threats and external climatic...

The rapid emergence of large-scale atlas-level single-cell RNA-seq datasets presents remarkable opportunities for broad and deep biological investigations through integrative analyses. However, harmonizing such datasets requires integration approaches to be not only computationally scalable, but also capable of preserving a wide range of fine-grain...

Building envelopes can manage light, heat gains or losses, and ventilation and, as such, play a key role in the overall building performance. Research has been focusing on increasing their efficiency by proposing dynamic and adaptive systems, meaning that they evolve to best meet the internal and external varying conditions. Living organisms are re...

Living envelopes, such as biological skins and structures built by animals, are functional and sustainable designs resulting from years of evolution, conditioned by biological and physical pressures from the environment. When building a home, animals demonstrate inspiring strategies to protect themselves from predator threats and external climatic...

Mouse lemurs are the smallest, fastest reproducing, and among the most abundant primates, and an emerging model organism for primate biology, behavior, health and conservation. Although much has been learned about their physiology and their Madagascar ecology and phylogeny, little is known about their cellular and molecular biology. Here we used dr...

Aging is not homogeneous in humans and the determinants leading to differences between subjects are not fully understood. Impaired glucose homeostasis is a major risk factor for cognitive decline in middle-aged humans, pointing at the existence of early markers of unhealthy aging. The gray mouse lemur (Microcebus murinus), a small lemuriform Malaga...

Building envelopes have a key role to the occupant comfort. Their design, implementation and functionalities highly influence the overall building performance. Some current research focus on strategies to improve buildings energy efficiency while minimizing their impact on the environment. Bioinspiration i.e., the inspiration of biological organism...

The physiological mechanisms of the responses toward stressors are the core of ecophysiology studies to understand the limits of an organism s flexibility and better predict the impact of environmental degradation on natural populations. However, little information is available when we question inter-individual variability of these physiological re...

Physical performance traits are key components of fitness and direct targets of selection. Although maternal effects have important influences on integrated phenotypes, their contributions to variation in performance and to phenotypic traits associated with performance remain poorly understood. We used an animal model to quantify the contribution o...

Most mirror-image stimulation studies (MIS) have been conducted on social and diurnal animals in order to explore self-recognition, social responses, and personality traits. Small, nocturnal mammals are difficult to study in the wild and are under-represented in experimental behavioral studies. In this pilot study, we explored the behavioral reacti...

Biomimetics is an opportunity for the development of energy efficient building systems. Several biomimetic building skins (Bio-BS) have been built over the past decade, however few addressed multi-regulation although the biological systems they are inspired by have multi-functional properties. Recent studies have suggested that despite numerous too...

Aims Determining tricuspid valve comparative anatomy and appropriate animal models for preclinical evaluation of prosthetic tricuspid valve implants. Methods and results We described and measured 81 heart specimens: 12 humans, 22 dogs, 21 sheep and 26 pigs. Tricuspid annulus circumference varied in humans from 109 to 149 mm, in pigs from 85 to 140...

Orientation preference maps (OPMs) are a prominent feature of primary visual cortex (V1) organization in many primates and carnivores. In rodents, neurons are not organized in OPMs but are instead interspersed in a “salt and pepper” fashion, although clusters of orientation-selective neurons have been reported. Does this fundamental difference refl...

Background Epidemiologic data suggest that, in humans, iatrogenic administration of compounds (cadaver‐sourced human growth hormone, dura mater graft) or cerebral surgeries with tools contaminated with Aβ and tau induce aggregated Aβ and possibly tau lesions. Aβ and tau lesions could thus be iatrogenically transmitted to humans. Several studies in...

Accurate tracking and analysis of animal behavior is crucial for modern systems neuroscience. However, following freely moving animals in naturalistic, three-dimensional (3D) or nocturnal environments remains a major challenge. Here, we present EthoLoop, a framework for studying the neuroethology of freely roaming animals. Combining real-time optic...

In seasonal environments, males and females usually maintain high metabolic activity during the whole summer season, exhausting their energy reserves. In the global warming context, unpredictability of food availability during summer could dramatically challenge the energy budget of individuals. Therefore, one can predict that resilience to environ...

Integuments of living organisms, as diverse as skin, hairs, cuticles, can manage the same environmental factors as building envelopes. Their thermal, acoustic, light, humidity and air regulation capacities can be quantified using physical parameters such as hydrometry, thermal conductivity, porosity, etc.

The recent interest in animal personality has sparked a number of studies on the heritability of personality traits. Yet, how the sources variance these traits can be decomposed remains unclear. Moreover, whether genetic correlations with life-history traits, personality traits and other phenotypic traits exist as predicted by the pace-of-life synd...

To face the load of the prevalence of Alzheimer’s disease in the aging population, there is an urgent need to develop more translatable animal models with similarities to humans in both the symptomatology and physiopathology of dementia. Due to their close evolutionary similarity to humans, non-human primates (NHPs) are of primary interest. Of the...

The original version of this article unfortunately contained a mistake in the authorgroup section. Author Grégoire Boulinguez-Ambroise's given name and surname were inadvertently interchanged.

The masticatory apparatus has been the focus of many studies in comparative anatomy – especially analyses of skulls and teeth, but also of the mandibular adductor muscles which are responsible for the production of bite force and the movements of the mandible during food processing and transport. The fiber architecture of these muscles has been cor...

Daily torpor is an energy-saving process which evolved as an extension of non-rapid eye movement (NREM) sleep mechanisms. In many heterothermic species there is a relation between torpor expression and the repartition of the different behavioural states of sleep. Despite the presence of sleep during this period of hypothermia, torpor induces an acc...

Alzheimer's disease is characterized by cognitive alterations, cerebral atrophy and neuropathological lesions including neuronal loss, accumulation of misfolded and aggregated β-amyloid peptides (Aβ) and tau proteins. Iatrogenic induction of Aβ is suspected in patients exposed to pituitary-derived hormones, dural grafts, or surgical instruments, pr...

Although studies have sought to characterize variation in forearm muscular anatomy across the primate order, none have attempted to quantify ontogenetic changes in forearm myology within a single taxon. Herein, we present muscle architecture data for the forearm musculature (flexors and extensors of the wrist and digits) of Microcebus murinus, a sm...

Circadian rhythms, which measure time on a scale of 24 h, are genetically generated by the circadian clock, which plays a crucial role in the regulation of almost every physiological and metabolic process in most organisms. This review gathers all the available information about the circadian clock in a small Malagasy primate, the gray mouse lemur...

The health benefits of chronic caloric restriction (CR) resulting in lifespan extension are well established in many species and has been recently demonstrated also in non-human primates, but its effects in humans remain to be proven on a long-term basis. CR might be a very efficient anti-aging strategy but its definition and limits must be well un...

Front Cover: Eight days old male gray mouse lemur (Microcebus murinus) holding on strongly to a branch. Photo: Grégoire BOULINGUEZ-AMBROISE.

A correction to this article has been published and is linked from the HTML and PDF versions of this paper. The error has been fixed in the paper.

Recent data confirmed the efficiency of caloric restriction for promoting both healthspan and lifespan in primates, but also revealed potential adverse effects at the central level. This paper proposes perspectives and future directions to counterbalance potential adverse effects. Efforts should be made in combining nutrition-based clinical protoco...

Buildings account for a significant part of the total energy consumption in developed countries. As interfaces between the indoor and outdoor environment, building envelopes play a major role in the energy efficiency of the building. They must be multi-functional and adaptive through days and seasons to achieve multi-regulation. Shaped by environme...

A whole suite of parameters is likely to influence the behavior and performance of individuals as adults, including correlations between phenotypic traits or an individual's developmental context. Here, we ask the question whether behavior and physical performance traits are correlated and how early life parameters such as birth weight, litter size...

The health benefits of chronic caloric restriction resulting in lifespan extension are well established in many short-lived species, but the effects in humans and other primates remain controversial. Here we report the most advanced survival data and the associated follow-up to our knowledge of age-related alterations in a cohort of grey mouse lemu...

Physical performance is crucial for animal survival and fitness. In this context, greater bite forces can provide advantages and may allow an individual to gain access to reproductive partners and/or different food resources. Here, we explored the determinants of bite force in a wild population of the brown mouse lemur (Microcebus rufus). Our objec...

Among environmental factors that may affect on brain function, some nutrients and particularly n-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids (n-3 PUFA) are required for optimal brain development. Their effects on cognitive functions, however, are still unclear, and studies in humans and rodents have yielded contradictory results. We used a non-human primate mode...

Maximal lifespan of mammalian species, even if closely related, may differ more than 10-fold, however the nature of the mechanisms that determine this variability is unresolved. Here, we assess the relationship between maximal lifespan duration and concentrations of more than 20,000 lipid compounds, measured in 669 tissue samples from 6 tissues of...

Prehension is essential for animal survival and fitness. It is involved in locomotion and feeding behavior and subject to physical and physiological constraints. Studies of prehension in primates have explored the importance of food properties and of the environment, but aging has rarely been studied although prehensile capacity may deteriorate wit...

Biomimetics, relying on the transfer of strategies from biology to technology, is an emerging research area in the field of building construction. Living organisms have developed adaptation strategies for thermal comfort conservation, air exchange, water and light management, based on homeostasis and without supply of non-renewable energy or materi...

The development of novel therapeutics to prevent cognitive decline of Alzheimer's disease (AD) is facing paramount difficulties since the translational efficacy of rodent models did not resulted in better clinical results. Currently approved treatments, including the acetylcholinesterase inhibitor donepezil (DON) and the N-methyl-D-aspartate antago...

Supplementary table 1. Raw data of young and aged animals before (day 1, D1) and after (day 2, D2) 8h sleep deprivation, with saline or two doses (0.1mg/kg [0.1] or 1 mg/kg [1]) of donepezil (DPZ) or memantine (MEM). (DOCX)

Grip strength is particularly important for arboreal species, which rely on this physical ability to grab and hold branches. However, the factors determining inter-individual variability in performance can be numerous, including the individual’s early life parameters (birth weight, growth rate), current determinants (body dimensions, age and sex) a...

Aim: To understand the mechanisms underlying the development of metabolic changes leading to obesity remains a major world health issue. Among such mechanisms, seasonality is quite underestimated although it corresponds to the manifestation of extreme metabolic flexibility in response to a changing environment. Nevertheless, the changes induced by...

The theory of sexual selection predicts that females should be discriminatory in the choice of sexual partners. Females can express their choice in two ways. In direct mate choice, they show preferences for certain partners. In indirect mate choice, they select partners by displaying sexually attractive traits, thus eliciting contest competition be...

Age-associated cognitive impairment is a major health and social issue because of increasing aged population. Cognitive decline is not homogeneous in humans and the determinants leading to differences between subjects are not fully understood. In middle-aged healthy humans, fasting blood glucose levels in the upper normal range are associated with...

Behavior varies among individuals and is flexible within individuals. However, studies of behavioral syndromes and animal personality have demonstrated that animals can show consistency in their behavior and as such may be restricted in their behavioral responses. Like any other trait, including morphology, performance, or physiology, personality i...

Bilateral multifocal corneal opacity was detected in a 4.5-year-old male captive gray mouse lemur (Microcebus murinus) without other clinical ocular changes. Histopathological examination revealed a severe diffuse granulomatous scleritis and focal keratitis with intralesional cholesterol, consistent with xanthomatous inflammation. This is the first...

The gray mouse lemur (Microcebus murinus) is considered a useful primate model for translational research. In the framework of IMI PharmaCog project (Grant Agreement n°115009, www.pharmacog.org), we tested the hypothesis that spectral electroencephalographic (EEG) markers of motor and locomotor activity in gray mouse lemurs reflect typical movement...

Grasping is important for arboreal species as it allows them to hold on to branches. Although grasping has been studied previously in the context of primate origins and as an indicator of age-induced loss in overall performance, little is known about the proximate determinants of variation in strength. We measured hand pull strength in 62 adult cap...

We report the high-coverage complete mitochondrial genome sequence of the gray mouse lemur Microcebus murinus. The sequencing has been performed on an Illumina Hiseq 2500 platform, with a genome skimming strategy. The total length of this mitogenome is 16 963 bp, containing 13 protein-coding genes, 22 transfer RNA genes, 2 ribosomal RNA genes and 1...

Decreased brain content of docosahexaenoic acid, the most abundant long-chain n-3 polyunsaturated fatty acid (n-3 LCPUFA) in the brain, is accompanied by severe neuro-sensorial impairments linked to impaired neurotransmission and impaired brain glucose utilisation. In the present study, we hypothesized that increasing n-3 LCPUFA intake at an early...

Grasping is a widespread behavior among tetrapod vertebrates. In primates, the hands and feet are involved in many tasks including arboreal locomotion and food acquisition. Yet, the origin and the evolution of prehensile capacities, which are highly diversified across this group, remain open for inquiry. Some researchers suggest that grasping evolv...

Telomere erosion leading to replicative senescence aging has been well documented in human and anthropoid primates, and provides a clue against tumorigenesis. In contrast, other mammals, such as laboratory mice, with short lifespan and low body weight mass have different telomere biology without replicative telomere aging. We analyzed telomere biol...

Sexual dimorphism is thought to be the result of sexual selection, food competition and/or niche differentiation, or simply the result of differential growth between the sexes. Despite the fact that sexual dimorphism is common among primates, lemurs are thought to be largely monomorphic. Yet, females of the species Microcebus are known to be larger...

Le dimorphisme sexuel est present dans de nombreux taxa dans le regne animal, notamment chez les mammiferes ou il est tres bien etudie. Ce phenomene a d’abord ete percu comme le resultat direct de la selection sexuelle et par la suite, d’autres theories ont mis en avant la competition pour l’acces a la nourriture ou encore la differenciation de nic...

Grâce aux améliorations des conditions de vie et de santé ces dernières décennies, nous connaissons une augmentation de l’espérance de vie. Cependant cela ne garantit pas la bonne santé. Chez l’humain, les capacités motrices peuvent se détériorer avec l’âge ou en cas de maladie telle que la maladie de Parkinson. La préhension est impliquée dans de...

Objectif de l’étude : L’étude de la personnalité est devenue un sujet de recherche important en écologie comportementale. La variabilité individuelle n’est plus considérée uniquement comme un artéfact. Plus récemment, les données ont montré que la flexibilité du comportement peut être restreinte dans certains cas et le comportement lui-même être co...