Deciphering the Role of Viral Dark Matter in Microbiome-Immune Homeostasis team (PHAGEMMUNE), led by Lejla Imamovic
Lejla Imamovic, an Inserm researcher, was until recently head of the "Microbiome-host interactions" group at the Center for Immunology and Infectious Diseases (CIMI). Her research focuses on the interactions between the microbiome and the immune system in inflammatory and autoimmune diseases.
The human gut contains trillions of viruses that infect bacteria, called bacteriophages, but we still know very little about how they affect our health. Although these viruses do not infect human cells, they can interact with the immune system and may play an important role in gut health.
The project of the new team aims to understand how gut viruses interact with human antibodies and how antibiotics disturb the balance between gut microbes and the immune system. We will study how these interactions change over time and whether they can be improved after antibiotic treatment.
By combining laboratory in vitro experiments, animal studies, and computer-based analysis, we hope to uncover hidden gut viruses and learn how they influence immunity. This research could lead to new ways to protect and restore gut health and improve how we use antibiotics.
Genome Regulation in Cell and Tissue Plasticity Team, led by Alexandre Mayran and Andrew Oldfield
Alexandre Mayran was previously a post-doc researcher at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL) in Lausanne, Switzerland; his research focuses on the epithelial-mesenchymal transition in a developmental context using in vitro mammalian models.
Andrew Oldfield, a CNRS researcher at the IGH, CNRS UMR 9002 in Montpellier, studies the pathological epithelial-mesenchymal transition in a different context: cancer progression and metastasis.
Their project as team co-leaders at Institut Cochin consists of exploring how genome regulation is dynamically rewired when cells change identity. Focusing on enhancers, distant DNA regulatory elements that control when and where genes are expressed, they study the epithelial-to-mesenchymal transition, a cellular reprogramming event crucial for embryonic development but exploited by metastatic cancers. To capture how gene regulation unfolds in real time they combine pseudo embryo models, single-cell genomics, live imaging, and genome engineering.
Bridging developmental biology and oncology, their work aims to decode the regulatory logic of cellular plasticity and harness it to build the next-generation of stem-cell derived models of embryos while uncovering new anti-metastatic strategies.
