Phenotypic diversity can arise from changes in the gene content of the genomes but also from modifications in the regulation of gene expression. The "genetic networks" team compared gene expression in 8 yeast species to find "regulatory outliers", i.e. conserved genes with special expression profiles compared to their orthologues. The combination of this approach with other functional genomics data (transcriptomics analyses and chromatine immunoprecipitation followed by deep sequencing) led us to identify two genes which are involved in the survival of the human pathogen Candida glabrata upon iron starvation conditions. Iron starvation being a key challenge for C. glabrata survival in blood, this discovery may help us to better understand the invasive strategy of this emerging pathogen.

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Angela Falciatore received the Prix Coup d'Elan 2018 from the Bettencourt Foundation. This prize will help to improve infrastructures and working conditions for researchers in the Life Sciences. Starting in January 2019, Angela will lead the department "Chloroplast Biology and Light Sensing in Microalgae" in IBPC, Paris.

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The latest publication of the new LCQB team "Telomere and Genome Stability" (Héloïse Coutelier and Zhou Xu) makes the cover of the December issue of Genes & Development!    The article (Coutelier et al. 2018 Genes Dev.) shows that telomere-induced senescent cells can adapt to the DNA damage checkpoint safeguard mechanism to force cell division, leading to increased genome instability, with important ramifications for aging and cancer. The cover displays cells bearing a fluorescent reporter construct monitoring of the checkpoint status in single cells.

The group Evolution and immunology of pathogens ( Rouzine, Pedruzzi, Barlukova) published the article "Evolutionary Footprint of Epistasis" on PLOS Computational Biology.

The article:
Raucci R, Laine E, Carbone A. Local Interaction Signal Analysis Predicts Protein-Protein Binding Affinity, Structure, 2018  [ Link to the article ]
has been recommended in F1000Prime as being of special significance in its field by F1000 Faculty Member Alexandre Bonvin. 

Pierre Louis Blaiseau of the Genetic Networks team recently published « Monod and the phenomenon of diauxie » in the Bulletin d’Histoire et d’Epistémologie des Sciences de la vie. This article described a part of the scientific activity of the Jacques Monod until then neglected by the historians: its interest during all its career for the mechanisms of enzymatic inhibition. Besides, it showed that, contrary to the standard narratives, the phenomenon of « diauxie » (double growth) was discovered by Monod during his thesis and not by the previous Frederic Diénert’s work

The Diatom Functional Genomics Team (L Taddei, GR Stella, JP Bouly, M. Jaubert and A. Falciatore) reported novel strategies to deal with environmental light stress in marine diatoms.  Their results recently published on Plant Physiology reveal that diatoms modulate non-photochemical quenching of excess excitation by activating different members of the LHCX protein family, with different light intensity activation thresholds and different patterns of association with photosystem II. This leads to mechanistically different and physically segregated excess energy quenching processes, as required for proper light-stress acclimation in the extremely variable conditions of the oceans.

Local Interaction Signal Analysis (LISA) is an empirical function designed to estimate protein-protein binding affinities. It explores the geometry of contact distributions at protein-protein interfaces and enables to identify hot-sites of favorable contacts playing a major contribution in binding affinity. LISA applies to a large variety of complexes resulting in a very stable behavior. It outperforms all existing comparable predictor methods predicting binding affinity.

The Analytical Genomics team.
Link to the article. 

Several members of LCQB co-authored « Meet-U: educating through research immersion », which appeared in PLOS Computational Biology on 03/15/2018. Meet-U is a new educational initiative that aims to train students for collaborative work in computational biology and to bridge the gap between education and research. Meet-U mimics the setup of collaborative research projects and takes advantage of the most popular tools for collaborative work and of cloud computing. Students are grouped in teams of 4–5 people and have to realize a project from A to Z that answers a challenging question in biology. In this paper, we report on our experience with Meet-U in two French universities with master’s students in bioinformatics and modeling, and with protein–protein docking as the subject of the course.

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In the framework of their cooperation, IFOM (Milan) and CQB (Paris) have set up a scientific rotation program specifically targeted to PhD students.
Students can spend three months in a host group on a scientific topic, with the goal of exploring new approaches and contexts,and acquiring new skills.

Here you can find general rules and how to apply.
Here you can find a list of currently posted projects ( you can also apply spontaneously outside of posted projects).

Contact: phd-rotation@ifom.eu