Vale Lab

Evolutionary Ecology of Infection, Immunity & Behaviour

We're based at the Institute of Evolutionary Biology within the School of Biological Sciences at the University of Edinburgh.

Our research addresses the causes and consequences of individual variation in the response to infection and we use the fruit fly as a model of infection, immunity and behaviour.

Read more about Evolutionary Ecology of Infection, Immunity & Behaviour

Our work has received generous support from:

Lab News

New preprint! Eevi's first PhD chapter testing two competing hypotheses for lifespan extension under DR is now on BioRxiv.

New paper! Tiina Salminen's comprehensive review of how mitochondrial variation may affect innate immunity is published in Front. Immunology.

New paper! Ali Hudson's Hons project showing diet-specific terminal investment following infection is now out in J. Evol. Biol.

New paper! Review with Zé Oliveira and Ana Bahia asks how are arbovirus vectors able to tolerate infectio n?

New paper! Work led by Jonti shows that viral infection causes sex-specific changes in fruit fly social aggregation behaviour

Congratulations Dr Siva-Jothy! Well done to Jonti for successfully defending his PhD!

Welcome to Mickael Bonnet who is visting us from U. Clermont-Auverge to do his MSc research project.

Congratulations to Tiina for receiving a 5-yr fellowship from the Finnish Academy of Sciences to continue her work on mitochondrial effects on immunity at Tampere U.

Success! Our grant proposal with Tiina Salminen on Mitochondrial genetic effects on innate immunity has been funded by the Leverhulme Trust!

Pedro gave a seminar at Can Ruti Biomedical Reseach centre (IPTG) in Barcelona. What an amazing place!

Our work on the evolutionary consequences of damage limiting drugs was recently highlighted in the PLOS XV collection.

Our book chapter "The influence of parasites on insect behavior" is now published in Insect Behavior: From Mechanisms to Ecological and Evolutionary Consequences.

New paper! Work led by Jonti and Katy on infection avoidance during cannibalistic foraging and oviposition has been published in Behavioral Ecology.

Valéria Romano visited our lab from Kyoto University to start an exciting collaboration on the role of disease on social group structure.

New paper! We published a methods paper showing how we measure bacterial shedding from orally infected flies.

New paper! Pedro reported on a recent study in Current Biology showing how sickness behaviours and metabolism control disease tolerance to malaria.

Congratulations to Jonti Siva-Jothy and Lauren White for getting an IDEAS Research Exchange grant to work on heterogeneity in pathogen transmission with me and Meggan Craft at U. Minnesota. Jonti and Lauren will swap labs for a few weeks this spring!

Pedro gave a seminar at Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine, and someone filmed it!

Listen to Pedro speak about Infection Avoidance in Drosophila at the Royal Society meeting "The evolution of parasite and pathogen avoidance behaviours".