[Dec. 1, 2022] We are happy to welcome Shubham Sharma, from the Indian Institute of Technology, Gandhinagar (IITGN), India. Shubham is currently doing his PhD in the lab of Bhaskar Datta; he successfully obtained an EMBO scientific Exchange grant to spend 5 months in our lab. He will work with Jeremie to apply the G4RP technology to colorectal cancers. Welcome to Dijon!
[Nov. 17, 2022] We are quite proud that 2 new articles have been accepted for publication in Nucleic Acids Res. concomitantly. In the first one, we explored the roles that G-quadruplexes (G4s) play in stress granules (SG) formation and dynamics. This study is two-fold, combining an experimental approach aimed at discovering by which cellular processes G4s act on SG formation, and a computational approach in which a machine learning tool (rG4detector) was developed to predict G4 formation. This work was done in collaboration with Eran Hornstein's lab, at the Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot (Israel). The second one is a review that summarizes the current state of knowledge about DNA junctions (three- and four-way DNA junctions), encompassing their structures and biological relevance along with a description of the cellular consequences of their stabilization by ad hoc ligands for therapeutic purposes. Many thanks to Christine Cardin (at Reading, UK), Kane and Angie for the help!
[Oct. 31, 2022] We are delighted to welcome Sandy Raevens for her PhD in the GATTACA lab. Sandy did her M2 internship in the team of Drs. Carine Masquéfa and Cindy Patinote at the IBMM, Montpellier (FR) working on the synthesis of heterocyclic compounds for fighting against pancreatic cancers. She has been selected for the project granted by the CNRS MITI, in the framework of a collaboration between the CNRS (France) and the Weizmann Institute of Science at Rehovot (Israel). We will thus collaborate with the Eran Hornstein's lab on the roles that G4-RNA plays in stress granules (SGs) formation. Beautiful science ahead!
[Oct. 31, 2022] We are really happy and proud that the distribution of two of our TASQs has been licensed by Merck KGaA and are now commercially available in the Sigma-Aldrich catalogue. These two TASQs, the biotinylated BioCyTASQ and the clickable MultiTASQ, can be implemented for various purposes including the affinity purification of both DNA and RNA G4s, their visualization by optical imaging (pre-targeted G4 imaging and in situ click imaging), etc., thus being highly multivalent TASQs or… MultiTASQs 😁
[Oct. 21, 2022] Delighted to be associated to a research program steered by Vincent Geli (CRCM Marseille, FR) on pediatric osteosarcomas now funded by the Ligue National contre le Cancer. This big project, gathering people from Marseille, Toulouse, Dijon, Lille and Strasbourg, aims at uncovering new therapeutic opportunities to treat pediatric cancers. Many thanks to Vincent for gathering such a promising consortium and eager to begin this program very soon!
[Oct. 20, 2022] Francesco brilliantly defended his Ph.D. work in front of a panel of specialists including Daniela Verga (Institut Curie, Orsay), Filippo Doria (Univ. Pavia, IT), Fred Boschetti (CEO CheMatech) and Franck Denat (ICMUB's director). We really enjoyed the scientific discussion right after the presentation, which was lively, dynamic, enriching and accurate. We thank once more Francesco for his very hard work with the TASQs (he's responsible for no less than 9 TASQs: CyTASQ and BioCyTASQ, TriazoTASQ and BioTriazoTASQ, MultiTASQ, azidoMultiTASQ and photoMultiTASQ, and the two unpublished tzN-TASQ and SqTASQs)) and wish him all the best for his future endeavors (in Italia).
[July 16, 2022] Wenli Zhang (Nanjing Agricultural University, China) and I provide here a view on what is currently known about genomics applied to the study of alternative DNA structures in plants, including G4s and i-motifs. Plant genetics have been fundamental for genetics (did you ever hear about a Czech monk who discovered the laws of genetics playing with pea plants.. Gregor Mendel? :-)); we aim here at describing how this field has recently and very rapidly evolved, under the impetus of the advances in sequencing techniques. This review is now published in Trends in Genetics.
[July 12, 2022] Our collaborative project named InJUNCTION (for Chemical tools for investigating DNA junctions) developed with Anton Granzhan (Institut Curie, Orsay, FR), Sébastien Britton (IPBS Toulouse, FR), Nicolas Chéron (ENS Paris, FR) and Lukas Trantirek (CEITEC Brno, CZ) has been selected by the ANR for granting. We're really happy to have 4 more years (and quite a bit of money :-)) to keep on investigating the biology of three-way DNA junctions in the aim of developing an innovative anticancer strategy. New and promising results soon!
[June 19, 2022] I am particularly proud about this new article from the group, now published in JACS Au as it reconciles two scientific fields that are very dear to me, G4 and G4-ligand on one side, and DNA damage and genetic instability on the other side. Here, using our new clicked TASQ TriazoTASQ, we keep on developing an innovative G4 imaging technique (pre-targeted G4 imaging) and use it for gaining invaluable insights into the mechanism behind the anti-proliferative activity of G4 ligands (e.g., PDS), providing a quantitative analysis of their DNA damaging properties. Congrats (and thanks) to all co-authors!
[June 14, 2022] We thank the CNRS MITI for selecting our project in the framework of a collaboration between the CNRS (France) and the Weizmann Institute of Science at Rehovot (Israel). This grant gives us the unique opportunity to keep on collaborating with the Eran Hornstein's lab on the roles that G4-RNA plays in stress granules (SGs) formation. In the present project we will aim at combining sequencing and proteomics in order to better characterize SG biology. We're happy to work with Yehuda Danino, from the Eran's lab, on this project, as it is a real pleasure to work with such a highly motivated PhD student! More news soon.
[June 12, 2022] Now that the COVID craziness is (almost) over, the G4 community will gather for one week in Marienbad, CZ for the 8th International Meeting on Quadruplex Nucleic Acids (http://g4thering.com/). The program is exciting and it will be so good to see (for real) G4-addict researchers from all over the world to discuss about the latest advances. Many thanks to the organizing committee (Lukas, Silvie and Jean-Louis) for giving me the opportunity to talk about our recent results (on which topic? a hint here :-)). See you there!
[May 13, 2022] I would like to thank my long-time collaborator Jun Zhou (Nanjing U., China) and also my new collaborator Carla Cruz (CICS-UBI, Portugal) for giving me the opportunity to be involved in very different projects, from the in-depth study of the catalytic properties of G4s (G4-DNAzyme) on one side to that of the functional relevance and regulatory roles of G4s in miRNA on the other side. The corresponding articles have now been published in Anal. Chem. & J. Pharm. Biomed. Anal., respectively. Many thanks for their trust!
[Apr. 6, 2022] Happy to be invited by Vincent Geli at the Marseille Cancer Reserach Center (CRCM, France) for discussing about G4-DNA, G4-RNA, genomic instability and.. fishing (yes, so close to the Mediterranean sea, an all too easy and cheap joke ;-))
[Apr. 4, 2022] All details you need to efficiently fish G-quadruplex-RNA (G4-RNA) from human cells using the G4RP-seq method (for G4-RNA precipitation & sequencing), initially described in Nat. Commun. are now thoroughly described in our Nat. Protoc. article. Many many thanks to Sunny Y. Yang and Judy M. Y. Wong (UBC Vancouver, CA) for their dedication and commitment to this protocol, to make it ever more simple and reliable!
[Apr. 1, 2022] The two articles we have the chance to publish with Wenli Zhang, from Nanjing Agricultural University, PRC, on the genome-wide discovery of both G4s (Plant Phys. article) and i-motifs (Nucleic. Acids Res. article) and their regulatory roles in plants (rice) have been highlighted in Plant Phys. by Maryam Foroozani (Emory Univ. Atlanta, USA) and in Trends in Plant Science by Martin Crespi (Paris Saclay, FR) & Frederico Ariel (Univ. Santa Fe, ARG). Our technology for tracking G4s in plants named BG4-IP-seq was also selected as the "Technology of the Month" by Trends in Plant Science. Many thanks for you kind words!
[Feb. 8, 2022] I would like to sincerely thank again Wenli Zhang, from Nanjing Agricultural University, China for his large-scale study of the roles that i-motifs (iMs, some sort of C-quadruplexes) play in the regulation of the gene expression in plants (rice). To this end, and in a manner that is fully reminiscent of what was done for G4s (see below) he has developed a genome-wide mapping referred to as iM-IP-seq that provides an unbiased demonstration of the regulatory roles of iMs in plant genetics. Honored and happy to be associated to this study now published in Nucleic Acids Res.