Research interests
Valérie Mezger and her Team (Development and Environment Interface) have been driven by a strong interest in the crosstalk between stress responses, neurodevelopment, and epigenetic mechanisms in the developing brain, in response to prenatal insults. They have recently developed cerebral organoid models of neurodevelopmental disorders belonging to chromatinopathies and actively collaborate with Geneticists and Neuro-paediatricians at Hôpital Robert Debré (Paris; INSERM, NeuroDiderot UMR1141), through the former DHU PROTECT (Département Hospitalo-Universitaire Promoting Research Oriented Towards Early CNS Therapy) and now the Fédération Hospitalo-Universitaire “Early Identification of Individual Trajectories in NeuroDevelopmental Disorders” (FHU I2D2), as well as with Mathematicians at the iBENS (Paris) for the development of new deep learning methods for the detection of subtle cellular and organoid phenotypes.
Bioinformatic tools and methods commonly used
The Team projects involve genome-wide transcriptomic and epigenomic analyses (ChIP-Seq, ATAC-Seq, DNA methylomics). More recently, they turned to single-cell multiomics (10X Genomics technology) for the identification of cell subpopulations that are the most vulnerable to prenatal stress in the developing brain and could represent the targets of future therapeutic strategies.
Bioinformaticians in the Team
Delara Sabéran-Djoneidi and Aurélie de Thonel have been trained thanks to the Diplôme Universitaire DU “Omics” at UP. They work in close interaction with bioinformaticians at the in-house EDC BiBs Platform and iPOP-UP, as well as with computational Biologists at Warwick University (Prof. Sascha Ott). Zoi Ioannidou is a PhD student in bioinformatics co-supervised by Délara-Sabéran-Djoneidi and Sascha Ott for sc-multiomics problematics in purified neural populations. Anis is a PhD Student co-supervised by Valerie Mezger and Auguste Genovesio at IBens for the deep learning aspects of the projects.