Postdoc experience (The Institut Pasteur)

• While completing my Marie Skłodowska-Curie Global Fellowship in Nadia Naffakh's Unit at Pasteur I worked on identifying cellular host factors that regulate various characteristics of viral RNA.

Postdoc experience (Duke University)

• During a postdoc in the Cullen Lab at Duke University I gained virology experience working with Influenza A virus (IAV), Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV-1), Murine Leukaemia Virus (MLV) and Simian Virus 40 (SV40).

• My research focused on studying RNA modifications, now termed epitranscriptomics, and their role in the viral life cycle.

• We mapped the location of N6-methyladenosine (m6A), the most prevalent RNA modification of cellular mRNA, on IAV positive and negative sense RNAs. We determined that the presence of m6A on these transcripts was highly beneficial to the virus, and found that introducing synonymous mutations to remove these modification significantly impacted the parthenogenesis of this virus in vivo, in mice.

PhD experience

• My research helped develop therapeutic strategies for the treatment of Meesmann epithelial corneal dystrophy (MECD) and TGFBI-related dystrophies, using CRISPR/Cas9 and siRNAs.

• We also uncovered the role of the unfolded protein response in the onset of MECD in human corneal tissue, and confirmed this in vivo in an MECD mouse model.

• During a research stay at the Enghild Lab in Aarhus University, Denmark, I worked on identifying the protein composition of corneal deposits resulting from mutations in the TGFBI gene, which could lead to a better mechanistic insight into these disorders.

• Our research was the first to describe the potential of CRISPR/Cas9 technologies to differentiate between 2 alleles that differ by a single SNP that result in the formation of a novel protospacer adjacent motif (PAM), which could have a real benefit in developing treatments for a large number of inheritable dominant negative disorders.