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The François Jacob Institute of Biology brings together five departments and three services
The last two years in scientific news
In an international collaboration, a team from MIRCen (CEA-Jacob) studied the properties of toxic alpha-synuclein aggregates in fixed brain samples from patients, depending on their tissue origin and the type of synucleinopathy developed.
A new international study, published in Cell, co-leaded by IDMIT (CEA-Jacob) and the Department of Medical Microbiology of the University of Amsterdam, presents the results of preclinical trials of a new protein vaccine candidate against Covid-19.
Under the coordination of the MSF Foundation, researchers and engineers from the University of Évry, the CEA, the CNRS, Médecins Sans Frontières and the Bacteriology/Virology Department of the Henri-Mondor hospital (AP-HP) teamed to develop a mobile application to ease the determination of antibiotic resistance.This application aimed at addressing a major public health issue will be freely available to medical personnel worldwide once clinically validated and CE certified. The demonstration of the technical feasibility of their approach was published on 19 February 2021 in Nature Communications.
In an article entitled "Reactive astrocyte nomenclature, definitions, and future directions," published as a first consensus statement in the journal Nature Neuroscience, more than 80 international specialists, including Carole Escartin from LMN (MIRCen/CEA-Jacob) as first co-author, have established a nomenclature and definitions for reactive astrocytes.
Genoscope was part of an international team that assembled the genome of Cotesia wasps and identified therein chromosomal colonization by a virus that settled into the wasp genome a hundred-million years ago. Their results suggest that the evolutionary course of a virus integrated within the genome of a eukaryote changes completely when the former is beneficial to the latter.
Researchers from LABGeM (CEA-Jacob), LaMME and the Pasteur Institute joined forces to develop a novel method for the analysis of prokaryote pangenomes, called PPanGGoLiN. As a complement to PPanGGoLiN, the team developed a second tool, panRGB, which brought unprecedented performance and speed to massive comparative genomics analyses.
Every year, the foundation Vaincre Alzheimer lends its support to promising projects in the battle against Alzheimer's disease. Among the six chosen this year is that of Lucile Ben Haïm of the Neurodegenerative Diseases Laboratory (MIRCen/CEA-Jacob). Her project involves targeting astrocytes to treat depression symptoms associated with this progressive neurological disorder.
Read about the contributions of two François Jacob Institute of Biology laboratories in an article on human stem cells and their use in research published in the most recent edition of the journal L'Édition of Université Paris-Saclay. The article discusses the interest of stem cells for the development of novel disease models and potential therapies.
At the most-recent DIM ELICIT colloquium, Marco Mendoza, team leader at SysFate (UMR8030/Genoscope/CEA-Jacob), presented his project POSCOVD, financed by the special Fight-SARS-Cov2 call for projects. POSCOVD seeks to develop a large-scale COVID-19 screening methodology, building particularly upon high throughput sequencing technologies (Oxford Nanopore Sequencing).
On 12 December 2020, the schooner Tara set sail from Lorient, France, for a new two-year scientific expedition. The voyage will cover 70,000 kilometers in the South Atlantic, along the African and South-American coasts and on to Antarctica. The expedition's objective is to explore the oceanic microbiome and determine its future in the current era of climate change.Conceived by the Tara Ocean Foundation, the CNRS, the CEA and the EMBL¹, the mission will involve close to 200 scientists across 42 research structures—including Genoscope (CEA-Jacob).
Since 2017, Genoscope has been involved in energy research. Several engagements within various CEA initiatives (CEA consortium for the SUNRISE project, the 2019 strategic domain NTE, the FCC workgroup for the integrated vision for energy, etc.) position Genoscope as an active participant in the CEA program Circular Carbon Economy (CEE).
CEA is a French government-funded technological research organisation in four main areas: low-carbon energies, defense and security, information technologies and health technologies. A prominent player in the European Research Area, it is involved in setting up collaborative projects with many partners around the world.