Elena Levashina is focusing on building on the research she developed on the role of the immune system in regulating the survival of malaria parasites in the Anopheles mosquito, the insect vector that transmits malaria to humans. She and her group now have a greater focus on the vector biology,...
Evi Soutoglou is interested in the most deleterious DNA breaks amongst the thousands of lesions our that DNA suffers in each of our cells every day : the Double Strand Breaks (DSB). Her goal is to investigate the dynamics of DSBs in relation to the surrounding chromatin structure and nuclear...
The Mononuclear Phagocyte System (MPS) is a group of cells with crucial functions in our immune system: it mediates and regulates inflammation. However, it is not only a powerful mechanism to control proliferation of microorganisms, it also –unfortunately- damages host tissues and contributes in the long term to many features...
Jean-Antoine Girault aims to identify the intracellular signalization mechanisms which underlie long term behavioral changes. The ability of the nervous system to adapt to a variable environment indeed depends on the modulation and plasticity of synapses between these neurons, which is regulated by their activity and by multiple neuromodulators....
X-inactivation is a process by which one of the two X chromosomes is transcriptionally silenced during early development in female mammals. It allows for dosage compensation between XX females and XY males. Edith Heard is studying this paradigm for developmental epigenetics to gain insights into the fundamental mechanisms that underlie...
Understanding how germ cells develop is not only of paramount medical interest for reproductive medicine, but is also crucial to comprehend how animal shapes and forms evolve through generations. Jean-René Huynh and his team are focusing on how the genetic information (through meiosis) and epigenetic information (through small RNAs)...
Mónica Bettencourt-Dias studies crucial structures in our cells, centrioles and cilia. She is investigating their biogenesis, evolution and misregulation using a variety of approaches, model organisms and patient samples....
Sandrine Etienne-Manneville focuses her research on cell migration and cell polarity. Cellular migration plays a key role in both developing organisms and adults ones, where it is involved in the immune response, scar tissue formation, or the dissemination of tumor cells. Cell polarity is fundamental for migration both for its...
In the blood, mucous membranes and lymphoid organs, dendritic cells provide a dual role as sentinels, but also as conductors of the immune orchestra. In the sequence of events that they are part of, the team of Philippe Pierre is particularly interested in the key stage of maturation of dendritic...
Bernardo Reina San Martin is interested in the molecular mechanisms driving the diversification of the repertoire of B-cells, the cells of our immune system producing antibodies. He specifically investigates somatic hypermutation (SHM) and class switch recombination (CSR), two processes involved in the immune response to generate an antibody mediated answer,...