CIR Seminar: Professor Arnaud Gautier

"Illuminating and controlling cell function with chemogenetics" 

Professor Arnaud Gautier  University of Sorbonne

Host: Professor Marc Vendrell

Attendance is compulsory at our seminars for CIR MSc and PhD students

Bio: Arnaud Gautier is Professor of Chemistry at Sorbonne University in Paris (France) and head of the team Chemogenetics to observe and control cells in the research unit ‘Chimie Physique et Chimie du Vivant’ (affiliated to Sorbonne University, École Normale Supérieure and CNRS). He studied chemistry at the Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon, where he received a PhD in chemistry in 2005. In 2006, he joined the group of Kai Johnsson at the École Polytechnique Fédérale of Lausanne where he developed methods for labeling proteins in living cells. In 2009, he joined the group of Jason W. Chin at the MRC laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, where he worked on the expansion of the genetic code of mammalian cells. Arnaud Gautier was Assistant Professor at the Ecole Normale Supérieure from 2010 to 2019, before joining Sorbonne University in 2019 as Full Professor. Arnaud Gautier’s lab has pioneered the development of chemogenetic tools that enable the observation and control of biomolecules and dynamic biochemical events within living cells and tissues. By combining chemistry with cutting-edge genetic techniques, these tools can allow biologists to investigate fundamental mechanisms, explore the causes of diseases, and develop novel therapeutic strategies.

Abstract: Cells and organisms are complex machines driven by a set of dynamic biological events tightly orchestrated in space and time. The comprehensive molecular understanding of their inner workings requires acute molecular tools to observe and modulate the key triggers and cell signaling events. To study the molecular mechanisms that govern cells and organisms over different scales in time and space, we combine molecular chemistry with protein engineering and genetic tools to develop novel approaches for the quantitative imaging and acute modulation of individual small molecules, proteins, organelles or cells. Made of organic synthetic molecules coupled to genetic tags, these systems combine the advantage of synthetic molecules with the targeting selectivity of genetically encoded tags, challenging the paradigm of fully genetically encoded systems. During this talk, I will present how these systems can be used for imaging, sensing and controlling cell biochemistry with high spatial and temporal resolution.

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