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lab profile
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Patrick Lemaire CNRS-CRBM
1919 route de Mende
Montpellier, Languedoc F-34293
France
patrick.lemaire@crbm.cnrs.fr
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| PI: |
YES |
| Taxa Studied: |
Invertebrate Animals |
| Techniques Employed: |
Quantitative PCR (qPCR), Solexa (Illumina) Sequencing, Bioinformatics/Sequence Analysis, In Situ Hybridization, Confocal Microscopy, Transgenesis, Morpholinos, Other, light-sheet imaging, automatic 3D reconstructions of embryos, ChIP-seq |
| Research Description: |
We are studying the intricate relationships between genotype and phenotype, using as a model system the embryos of close relatives of the vertebrates, the ascidians Ciona intestinalis and Phallusia mammillata. Ascidians were chosen because of the anatomical and genomic simplicity of these organisms, that permits a systems biology approach to their development. In addition, this large group of marine animals (>2300 species) shows an extraordinary conservation of embryonic lineages, cell fates and cell shapes, even between species whose genomes have massively diverged during their 500 MY of parallel evolution. Ascidians thus offer a unique opportunity to decipher the developmental programme of a chordate, and to understand how developmental stability is encoded in genomic DNA. Our approach is to move step by step from genome sequence to transcriptional regulation, to the assembly of Gene Regulatory Networks, to their control of cell fates and cell shapes, making full use of the ongoing revolutions in high throughput sequencing and live imaging. Our team is highly interdisciplinary and international, with members coming from the fields of biology and computer science. Our working language is English. |
| Lab Web Page: |
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| Willing to Host Undergraduates: |
YES |
| Actively Seeking Undergraduates: |
YES |
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