Projects:

 

BIOPHYMS: Mass spectrometry for nucleic acids biophysics: dealing with diversity.

(ATIP-Avenir, 2013-2015 & Marie Curie CIG, 2013-2016)

Mass spectrometry and ion mobility spectrometry will be conceived as a new biophysics approach to study ligand-induced rearrangements in G-quadruplex DNA, with a focus on human telomeric DNA for the proof of concept. One main goal is to understand rearrangements in long, multi-subunit G-quadruplex forming sequences, and in double-stranded regions of promoters.

 

 

DNAFOLDIMS: Advanced mass spectrometry approaches to reveal nucleic acid folding energy landscapes.

(ERC Consolidator grant, 2014-2019)

A key aspect is to develop a unique instrumental setup combining mass spectrometry, ion mobility and circular dichroism ion spectroscopy, and apply these approaches to biologically important regulatory nucleic acids. Applications will focus on the characterization of secondary structures of nucleic acids, and then other folding motifs, in the gas phase, and on secondary or tertiary structure changes in RNA riboswitches.

 

 

MetaRNA: RNA-based technologies for single-cell metabolite analysis.

(Marie Curie ITN within H2020, 2015-2018, role: partner)

MetaRNA is a European research-training network, in which young researcher will do their PhD, and thereby will be excellently prepared for the future academic or industrial job market. Scientific projects are at the interface between RNA biology and metabolism: we will develop RNA-based molecular sensors, with which we can probe cellular metabolism at the single cell level. Such capability will allow us to address important problems in diseases and biotechnology, where increasing evidence suggests that metabolic cell-to-cell heterogeneity is a key problem. In the network, our specific project is to characterize RNA-metabolite interactions using mass spectrometry.