October 2025
Welcome Sam!
Sam Kong joined us on 1st of October, to start his PhD! He will be working on the MitoMetaTis project, developing multi-layer networks for multi-omics integration in mitoXplorer.
Sam comes from data science and is eager to learn and apply his skills to biology!
September 2025
Hello - Goodbye!
Celebrating the MdC position of Galadriel and the CNRS CRCN position of Solene together with the teams of Anais Baudot and Paul Villoutreix (MMG), and of Leo Guignard and ourselves (IBDM).
September 2025
Congratulations, Dr. Ismahene!
Ismahene defended her thesis on September 25th! We are very proud of you!
September 2025
IBDM retreat in Hyeres
Institute retreat in beautiful Hyeres!
September 2025
CENTURI day with our alumni(s)
We celebrated the existence of CENTURI (https://centuri-livingsystems.org/) and our alumni network in September in Pharo with an exciting day of science followed by a great party at the Gaby Villa in Marseille! It was great to have Maxime back for 2 days from Belgium, where he is continuing to work on graph theory in biology - applying it to fungal networks, as well as to language recognition and social interactions of sperm whales.
https://researchportal.unamur.be/en/persons/lucasm,
& the CETI project: https://www.projectceti.org/.
September, 2025
Welcome Galadriel!
In September, Galadriel has joined as as Maitre de Conf in Bioinformatics from Aix-Marseille University, after successfully winning the Concours!
Galadriel studied in Bordeaux and did her PhD in data integration and graph theory. She worked at the MMG with Anais Baudot before joining us. She will be working on data science and data integration, mostly using knowledge graphs and AI.
She will also teach in the Biololgy and Bioinformatics Masters, as well as in Informatics.
We are very happy that Galadriel has chosen us as host laboratory!
August, 2025
Welcome Maelle!
With Maelle, we have our second M2 student from Germany this year! Maelle studies in Potsdam and is interested in metabolic modelling. She will look at the metabolism of developing neurons, using our mitoMammal metabolic model. She will also invest in other methods for data integration.
April, 2025
We said goodbye to Nina, our talented M2 student from Saarbrücken, and say hello to Amrythia, our new M2, as well as 3 new M1 students - in a group brunch
February, 2025
3rd update of mitoXplorer has been accepted for publication!
We have updated mitoXplorer to its 3rd version, allowing users to mine and integrate single-cell data from a mitochondrial perspective.
Together with the scXplorer script, users can process single-cell data objects from popular scRNA-seq analysis tools such as scanpy or seurat to create analysed pseudo-bulk data which can be analysed using the classical interfaces of mitoXplorer; as well as a single-cell count matrix containing only the 1200 mito-genes: this allows to perform data mining on single-cell basis to find mitochondria-centric variability of cell populations, using newly developed interfaces in mitoXplorer 3.0.
The tool is available here: https://mitoxplorer3.ibdm.univ-amu.fr.
I was just accepted for publication (M Haering, A Del Bondio, H Puccio, BH Habermann, mitoXplorer 3.0, a web tool for exploring mitochondrial dynamics in single-cell RNA-seq data. Journal of Molecular Biology, 169004): https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jmb.2025.169004
February 2024
Post-Xmas brunch ...
There was soooo much food!
December 2024
Team tile ...
For this year's X-mas we were asked to make a team tile that represents what the IBDM means to us. We chose to represent our projects in bubbles, and tried to place them so that overlapping themes and techniques would meet on the tile.
Here is the result - most important to all are the students and postdocs, who carry out their projects and contribute to fun and success that we have experienced since we arrived in 2016! Not to forget our many Master students, we have hosted over the years, for whom there was no space left on the tile.
November 2024
October 2024
October 2024
Stephen's postdoctoral work, with contributions from our PhD student Theo, on a mitochondrial metabolic model for human and mice, mitoMammal, has been accepted for publication! With this model, users can model human and mouse data on mitochondrial metabolism, using constraint-based modelling techniques, such as Flux Balance Analysis (FBA).
Next to adapting the original human mitochondrial metabolic model, mitoCore, to work with mouse data as well, we added the reduction of CoQ by DHODH as part of pyrimidine synthesis pathway to the model, and also corrected some errors in the Gene Protein Reaction (GPR) rules in the respiratory chain.
We used mitoMammal to model heart and brown adipose tissue metabolism.
We are very proud of our work and congratulate Stephen and Theo!!
It is available here: https://doi.org/10.1093/bioadv/vbae172
October 2024
In October, we have 2 new recruitees to the team:
Chaimae, who will be working with us as engineer for at least the next year! Chaimae did her M2 with us and wants to get some coding experience in a scientific lab. She will be working on the evoMotif database, as well as be responsible for further development of the mitoXplorer 3.0 web-tool.
Nina is from Saarbrücken in Germany and has joined us as a M2 student. She will work with Theo on metabolic modelling and try to find and develop methods to compare results of Flux-Balance Analysis modelling in a systematic way.
September 2024
In September, Jean-Michel Arbona joined us as independent researcher and project leader! He decided to move from Lyon, where he was at ENS Lyon in the team Laboratory of Biology and Modeling of the Cell, to Marseille to join our team.
He will start his own independent research line in the team, focusing on understanding replication in eukaryotic cells, using mathematical modelling and machine learning.
July 2024
These are Stephen's last days with us! After nearly 3 years, Stephen is moving on to his Lecturer Position at the University of Liverpool!
It was a great 3 years with you, Stephen, we will miss you dearly! And we wish you all the very best for your new exciting position in Liverpool, with lots of good projects, collaborations, students, papers and success!
July 2024
As coordinators, we were awarded the ANR grant 'MitoMetaTis'. In this project, we want to understand the tissue-specific behaviour of mitochondria, integrating multi-omics data. We will invest this money in extending our mitoXplorer platform to integrate metabolomics, together with proteomics and/or transcriptomics data using multi-layer networks.
We are collaborating with the team of Arnaud Mouier (Bordeaux) and Laurent Tichit (Marseille) to solve this puzzle.
We will soon be looking for PhDs and engineers for this project.
As collaboration partners, we are collaborating with Emmanuelle Bouveret (Paris) and Tam Mignot (Marseille) to dissect the metabolism and the evolution fatty acid metabolism in predatory bacteria in the project FattyMix.
Soon, a PhD position will be available in these projects in our lab.
June 2024
We are proud to present MechanoProDB , which was just published in Databases (Oxford): https://doi.org/10.1093/database/baae047
It is the work of Ismahene, our shared PhD student with the Felix Rico lab! it holds information on the mechanical properties of proteins. It provides curated information from in vitro and in silico experiments on parameters of protein mechanical properties, such as unfolding forces, energy landscape parameters and contour lengths of unfolding steps. In addition, we have encoded the unfolding pathways for each protein. Congratulations, Ismahene!!
MechanoProDB is freely available at: https://mechanoprodb.ibdm.univ-amu.fr.
Happy browsing!
May 2024
Mathias received his official Diploma from his Master course in 'Engineering and Neuroscience' at Imperial College London.
Well done, Mathias!!
February 2024
Our team is part of a competition for a tenured Assistant Professor position in Bioinformatics: https://sites.google.com/view/habermannlab/job-opportunities. Apply if you find our research cool, if you have a good track record in publications and some teaching experience and if you speak French well enough to teach Bachelor and Master level courses!
24.12.2023
1.12.2023
1.12.2023
Mathias is our new CENTURI PhD student we share with Ronan Sicre from the LIS. Mathias is a computer scientist and he will work on using deep learning to classify mitochondrial states.
11.-15.9.2023
Bringing together people from different disciplines to discuss the importance of metabolism (and mitochondria) during development.
3.5.2023
Jan is our last M1 student to leave the lab! It was great fun to host our M1's this year!
3.5.2023
As Maxime was visiting us in Marseille, we ceased the moment to celebrate our Cell Report Methods paper with him! Lynn made a real artwork of cake, which tasted amazingly!
1.2.2023
Many biological systems are organized in temporal phases or states. The cell cycle, for example, has 4 major phases: G1/S/G2 and M. Circadian rhythm is a second example, in which key clock genes regulate gene expression in a daily 24-hour rhythm that has evolved to adapt to the daily light and dark cycles. Such temporal phases or states of a biological system are created by a precisely timed availability of specific regulatory proteins in a cell, as well as their precise interactions with one another.
We developed a method, Phasik, to extract phase information from these time-series experiments by combining temporal expression data with interaction data from protein interaction networks. We build (partially) temporal networks and clustering the ‘snapshots’ of this temporal network. Phasik can reliably recover the well-known phases and sub-phases of the cell cycle and detect cell cycle arrest in mutants. With Phasik, we can also recover the 24-hour rhythm of the circadian clock and we show that this rhythm is perturbed in clock-gene mutants.
Phasik is the first algorithm for temporal network clustering applied and available for biological systems. Moreover, it is the very first time that we demonstrate that partial temporal information for just a subset of interactions in the network is sufficient for extracting phases from a temporal system. Phasik can be used to infer phases for a wide range of less well-known biological systems and can help gain insight in their underlying mechanisms. The code is freely available as a Python package with Jupyter notebooks (https://gitlab.com/habermann_lab/phasik). Want to know more? Find our article here: https://www.cell.com/cell-reports-methods/fulltext/S2667-2375(23)00004-8
24.12.2022
24.10.2022
24.10.2022
5.10.2022
Theo has been with us for his M2 project and he received a PhD fellowship from AMU University. He will be working on the evolution of bacterial predation, on the computer and in the lab (at LCB with the team of Tam Mignot).
4.10.2022
We spent two days with our colleagues from IBDM in a nice place close to Hyeres, sharing conversations, ideas and lots of fun!
Maria Mandela won the second prize for best image in Electron Microscopy with her image of Oscarella pretending to be an easter bunny (or the other way around??)! Congratulations, MM!!
Rikesh gave a presentation in the category "I present someone else's work" - here on a project from the Lecuit lab. He also did a great job presenting his own work ... and won the prize! Congratulations, Rik!!
18.7.2022
Roman, former PhD student of the Habermann lab, fell in love with Marseille while being here. Now, he comes visit every year! Do you wonder, why? Then, take a look at the beautiful Calanques!!
6.-8.7.2022
Margaux and I went to Berlin to present our work and integrate with the EU-rare disease projects PROSPAX and TREAT-ARCA. It was a great experience to meet all the scientists involved and to share exciting science!
07.05.2022
Our mitoXplorer 2.0 paper has just been published on the NAR web-server issue 2022 web-site.
mitoXplorer 2.0 is a major upgrade of our mitoXplorer 1.0 server, a platform for the analysis, visualisation and now also integration of -omics data in mitochondria-centric way. We have added several new interfaces to mitoXplorer, allowing to look for enriched mito-processe, analyse time-series data, or compare data across species. Most importantly, we have added two integrative interfaces that look for regulators of mitochondrial functions and mito-gene expression dynamics: one function searches for potential transcriptional regulators (via our AnnoMiner platform); the second identifies active subnetworks of selected mito-genes - based on cellular expression data (using our viPEr algorithm).
Check out the mitoXplorer paper here: https://doi.org/10.1093/nar/gkac306
18.02.2022
Fabio, who has been with us for 4 years, has defended his PhD on February 18th! Fabio was an amazing student and it is sad that he will leave the team! We wish him all happiness and success for his future!
29.11.2021
We had an early X-mas party this year, where we shared good food, small presents and some games afterwards. It was good to do this live again! (... just to be safe, all being vaccinated and tested negative with an antigen test).
01.11.2021
RNfuzzyApp is a R-shiny app that allows non-computer trained, wet-lab biologists to analyze their RNA-seq data in an R-shiny, web-based, user-friendly environment. RNfuzzyApp offers several methods for data normalization and differential expression analysis. It also includes a fully automated pipeline to do soft-clustering with the method Mfuzz to analyze time-course expression data.
You can run RNfuzzyApp on any computer with any web-browser and a version of R higher than 3.6.
You can download the software here: https://gitlab.com/habermann_lab/rna-seq-analysis-app
And find instructions on how to use it also here: https://gitlab.com/habermann_lab/rna-seq-analysis-app
Thanks Margaux for your terrific work!
01.10.2021
Ismahene is a shared CENTURI PhD student with Felix Rico (LAI, Marseille) and will work on identifying and analyzing mechano-sensitive motifs in proteins. Stephen is a systems biologist and will use modelling techniques to better understand mitochondrial metabolism in different cell types.
Ismahene Mesbah is a new PhD student in the lab
Stephen Chapman is a new postdoc in the lab
10.09.2021
Our long-term guest student, Amelie Vernale, successfully defended her PhD today! Congratulations, Dr. Vernale :)!
11.08.2021
We met today all together for the first time in 1 1/2 years of Corona to celebrate several papers and also for Maxime's leaving party ... vaccinated and outside, having fun playing Petanque! Our game was very exciting, with some last-minute changes of scores. Maybe the Pastis did help after all??
29.7.2021
Wonders can come true!! The paper about our new cool tool AnnoMiner is published. With the AnnoMiner tool (http://chimborazo.ibdm.univ-mrs.fr/AnnoMiner) you can integrate and annotate ChIP-seq and other types of epigenetic data, as well as look for enriched transcriptional regulators of gene-sets. It is now available at Scientific Reports: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-021-94805-1
This time, a big Thank You to Fabio and Arno, and to all our collaborators who made this paper possible!
The AnnoMiner web-server
With AnnoMiner, you can annotate and integrate ChIP-seq and other epigenetic peaks, look for nearby and long-range interaction of a peak, as well as look for enriched transcription factors of a gene-list.
Interested: you can download try AnnoMiner here: http://chimborazo.ibdm.univ-mrs.fr/AnnoMiner.
1.7.2021
After a ~7 months review process, our manuscript on the Cytoscape app TimeNexus, which enables users to integrate time-series data with an interaction network using temporal multilayer networks, has been accepted for publication and has been released on 1st of July in Scientific Reports: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-93128-5.
A big Thank You to Michael, and to all our collaborators who made this paper possible!
The TimeNexus workflow
TimeNexus is a Cytoscape app that is able to convert interaction data together with time-series data in a temporal multilayer network (tMLN). By using the Cytoscape apps PathLinker or the ANAT server, the user can then extract active subnetworks - containing differentially experssed genes in the successive temporal layers. The tMLNs, as well as the active, temporal subnetworks can be visualized with TimeNexus.
Interested: you can download TimeNexus and user instructions directly from the Cytoscape app store: https://apps.cytoscape.org/apps/TimeNexus.
21.4.2021
Michael did it! Today, he successfully defended his PhD thesis! We are very proud of him and - though we are sad to see him leave - we wish him all the very best for his future!
Left: Michael's graduation hat;
Right: our garticphone game was heavily influenced by the events of the day ...
Workflow for phase extraction from temporal networks
March 2021
Together with the teams of Alain Barrat (CPT) and Laurent Tichit (I2M), we submitted the third paper in a row: can we extract phases from temporal biological data using complex networks? Biological processes are often temporally organized and it requires the precise interaction of proteins to make this happen. We wanted to account for these temporally ordered binding events by modeling them as complex, temporal networks. We then apply clustering to the snapshots of the temporal network - representing time - to extract information on the phases of a process.
Check out the pre-print on bioXriv.
The associated tool, Phasik, is available at: https://gitlab.com/habermann_lab/phasik and can also be installed with pip.
Schematic representation of AnnoMiner functions
January 2021
We just submitted the manuscript of AnnoMiner, our web-tool for annotation, integration and enrichment analysis of epigenetics and transcription factor occupancy data. AnnoMiner introduces a flexible way for genomic peak annotation, by giving control to the user on which gene feature attributes should be used to consider a gene featuer as associated with a peak. Moreover, it allows full integration of two peak files plus e.g. a dataset from differential expression analysis, via one single user interface. AnnoMiner also allows users to explore the nearbly genes (5 upstream and 5 downstream genes) of a genomic peak, e.g. a binding site harboring a mutation, or a genomic deletion, thus determining their effect on nearby gene expression. AnnoMiner is web-based and very user-friendly, making it ideally suited for biologists. Finally, it uses high-quality transcription factor and epigenetic ChIP-seq datasets (from ENCODE, modENCODE and modERN) to perform enrichment analysis on user-provided gene lists, allowing to identify potential regulators of co-regulated genes.
Check out the pre-print on bioXriv.
The AnnoMiner web-server is freely available at: http://chimborazo.ibdm.univ-mrs.fr/AnnoMiner/
January 2021
Finally, after two years of re-construction, we were able to move in our new labs. We have 3 nice labs that we will hopefully be able to use again properly after the pandemic has quieted down. Here are some impressions from the move.
Fabio, hands-on
Where is that plug??
What a nice view we have again!
January 2021
Integrating -omics data with biological networks such as protein-protein interaction networks is a popular and useful approach to interpret expression changes of genes in changing conditions, and to identify relevant cellular pathways, active subnetworks or network communities. Yet, most -omics data integration tools are restricted to static networks and therefore cannot easily be used for analyzing time-series data. In TimeNexus, we project temporal data on a multilayer network: each layer represents one time-point. We refer to these networks as 'temporal multilayer networks (tMLNs). With TimeNexus, a user can easily create such a tMLN simply by providing tabular information on the network itself, as well as the temporal layers in form of time-series data. TimeNexus furthermore provides a framework for visualizing a tMLN, as well as for extracting active subnetworks using the Cytoscape apps PathLinker and the ANAT server. See more on our web-pages.
TimeNexus is freely available from the Cytoscape app store at https://apps.cytoscape.org/apps/TimeNexus.
Check out the entire paper at the ResearchSquare Preprint server: https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-133258/v1
December 2020
They look nice, bright and practical. We will also have common discussion spaces on each floor, making interactions with other teams easier.
November 2020
Together with the team of Helene Puccio (INMG, Lyon, https://www.inmg.fr/puccio/?lang=en) and Yvon Trottier (IGBMC, Strassbourg, http://www.igbmc.fr/research/department/4/team/49/), we were positively reviewed to receive FRM funding to extend the mitoXplorer platform for Ataxias. In this new project, we will not only implement a new Ataxia interactome, but also adapt mitoXplorer to work with single-cell RNA-sequencing data. We are excited and looking forward to our collaboration with Helene and Yvon!
November 2020
A new version of our mitoXplorer platform, mitoXplorer 2.0 is now online! MitoXplorer 2.0 goes beyond pure visualization and allows you to look for regulators of mito-gene expression dynamics. You can now look for transcription factors regulating co-expressed genes; and search for signaling pathways regulating mito-genes, using a new implementation of the viPEr environment search algorithm.
Interested? Try it out here: http://mitoxplorer2.ibdm.univ-mrs.fr/
June 2020
Margaux and Tristan have successfully defended their M2 thesis! Margaux is ranked 2nd of her year, Tristan 7th. Congratulations to them both!
March 21st 2020
After some technical issues in the last couple of weeks, HH-MOTiF is up and running again! Please check out our de novo motif prediction server here:
March 19th, 2020
... and first group picture taken with everybody present!
Stay home, stay safe!
March 16th, 2020
Like many labs in the country and around the world, also the IBDM had to shut down to minimal mode today in reaction to the rapid spread of the Sars-Cov2 virus. We in the IBDM computational lab are lucky that we can - almost - seamlessly continue our work from home office. So today, we have started to turn part of our homes into offices and to install our virtual lab using Slack, Zoom and co.!
• Read about the Corona virus pandemic from the WHO.
• How to protect yourself and the ones you love from getting infected (CDC).
• See the virtual dashboard of virus spread from Johns Hopkins University.
• See how social distancing is helping flatten the infection curve: Coronavirus simulator from the Washington post.
March 2020
In the middle of the Corona crisis, Rikesh joined us as a CenTuri postdoc in a joint project with Tam Mignot (LCB). Rikesh will study adaptive evolutionary strategies of the predatory bacterium Myxococcus xanthus, to different preys using a multi-omics approach.
January 2020
It is now official! Sebastien is joining our team as a Maitre de Conference ! He is teaching at the Bioinformatics masters and bachelor programs at the Aix-Marseille University in Luminy. His research interests are transposons, for which he is a true expert and which keep him awake at night!
January 2020
It is again time for hosting some master students in our lab! We have 4 M2 students this year; and 2 M1s. We are looking forward to a crowded and fun time in the lab!
December 2019
December 2019
We are proud and happy that the manuscript on mitoXplorer, a platform to mine the expression dynamics of mito-genes has been accepted in NAR just now!
Check out the mitoXplorer server!
Check out the mitoXplorer paper!
October 2019
We went on the Institute retreat to the beautiful Camargue national park. Next to outreach sessions for the administrative and technical staff of our Institute, there were two poster sessions, where PhDs and Postdocs could present their work to their colleagues.
Maxime @ his poster
Fabio explaining mitoXplorer
Michael spotted the Paparazzi
Amazing colors in the Camargue
September 2019
Maria Mandela joined our team in September 2019. She is a shared CenTuri postdoc with the team of Andre le Bivic (IBDM) and Emmanuelle Renard (IMBE/IBDM). Maria Mandela will work on the evolution of epithelia and combine wet-lab techniques with data mining and remote homology detection.
July 2019
Three of our applicants were successful in getting their grants!
Rikesh will join us in fall as a Postdoc in a joint CenTuri project with the team of Tam Mignot at LCB. Maria Mandela will join us also as a CenTuri postdoc in a collaborative project with the team of Andre le Bivic from IBDM.
Paul will join us in fall as a PhD student after having successfully applied for a PhD fellowship from the AMU university.
Congratulations to our three newcomers and we are looking forward to having them in our team!
June 2019
All our Master students, Elissar and Melina (both M1), as well as Alexandre, Nathanael and Paul (M2) have successfully defended their theses.
Congratulations to all of you!!
We wish them a lot of success for all their future endeavors!
And thanks for all the nice food today ...
June 2019
Maxime is joining our team in June 2019. He is a shared Postdoc of the CenTuri program. In a collaboration with Alain Barrat from the CPT and Laurent Tichit from the I2M he will work on complex networks in biology.
May 2019
We submitted mitoXplorer for peer review last week!
Find the bioRxiv version of our manuscript here: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/641423v1
the link to the mitoXplorer web-tool: http://mitoxplorer.ibdm.univ-mrs.fr/
the link to the gitlab repository: https://gitlab.com/habermannlab/mitox
January 2019
Our team is breaking the record in the Institute: we host 6 Master students this year, 3 M1 students (Elissar, Melina and Kamilya) and 3 M2 students (Alexandre, Nathanael and Paul).
5 pursue the Aix-Marseille Bioinformatics Master for Software Development and Data Analysis (DLAD: https://formations.univ-amu.fr/ME5SBI-PRSBI5AB.html)