Damien Devos

Damien P. Devos is a Directeur of Research at the Institut Pasteur de Lille, FR. He explores biodiversity, non-model organisms, particularly PVC (Planctomycetes, Verrucomicrobia, Chlamydiae) bacteria, and evolution using computational biology, comparative genomics and proteomics, protein structure prediction and comparison, sequence- and structure-based phylogeny with theoretical considerations (Devos, MBE 2021). Experimentally, his group uses members of the PVC bacterial superphylum to characterize the biodiversity, interrogate their role in the transition of cell types, division modes and other features (Rivas-Marin et al., Nat Com 2023; Henriques et al. , iScience 2025). He and his group pioneered the characterization of PVC bacteria and their place in the tree of life.

Recent genomics approaches, metagenomics, have greatly improved our sampling of natural diversity and uncovered previously unknown microbial lineages. This revolution revealed the huge biodiversity that is out there, unknown to us, evidencing the enormous number of exciting fundamentals in biology to be discovered in the so-called non-model organism. Amongst the big questions that these discoveries promise to answer is the Tree of Life. The relationship between the three domains of life is still one of the most important unanswered questions in Biology. Members of the bacterial Planctomycetes-Verrucomicrobia-Chlamydiae (PCV) superphylum display features that are rarely observed in bacteria, some of which are usually more associated with eukaryotes or archaea. I will show how the study of these bacteria participate in our exploration of the biodiversity and can redefine our understanding of the Tree of Life.