Pascale CREPIEUX (CNRS Research Director)

I have always been passionate about the mechanisms whereby a signal from the cellular environment is transduced into an adapted biological response. However, in my early research career, there was a black box between the second messengers produced in the vicinity of membrane receptors and the regulations of gene expression by transcription factors, such as the Ets-1oncogene that I studied during my PhD. Four years later, the first signaling cascades were starting to be identified, thanks to breakthrough technological improvements, such as the yeast two-hybrid. I exploited these advances during my post-doctoral stay in Canada, to identify a new regulation of the NF- B / I B complex, and thus better understand how the signal propagates through the cell, to the nucleus. When I arrived in Tours I initiated mechanistic studies on the signaling pathways induced by a gonadotropic hormone, FSH. Today, to understand the relationships between the FSHR conformational changes and the dynamics of the downstream signaling, we are developing intracellular antibody fragments directed against the intracellular regions of the receptor. In FSHR target cells in the male gonad, we also investigate local mRNA translation, a process that could underlie their function in the germ cell niche. The dynamic modeling approaches of complex systems developed in our group should help theorizing not only the temporal aspects, but also the spatial constraints linked to these processes.

#Translation and plasticity
#Multi-scale modeling
#Signaling Bias