Under unfavorable conditions, C. elegans responds with developmental changes, delay of reproductive period and increased longevity. We are interested in the genes and genetic pathways involved in the regulation of these decisions....
My research focuses on how the diversity of fates and morphologies of the nervous system are generated....
The main interest of the Poulin lab is to understand how signalling events occurring in the extracellular space can produce a response inside the cell to impact on the chromatin structure. This can release the transcriptional machinery for activation or prevent its engagement for repression....
The major research interest in my newly established laboratory concerns the relationship between genotype and developmental phenotypes and how the environment modifies this relationship....
In both vertebrates and invertebrates, postmitotic neurons are often generated by asymmetric divisions of neuronal progenitors such as neural stem cells. This general mechanism used to build the nervous system raises two important questions : how are these asymmetric divisions coordinated in space and how do the daughter cells acquire different fates....
Understanding how environmental variation and genotype-environment interactions contribute to phenotypic variation is a central challenge in current biology. While the significance of phenotypic plasticity and genotype-by-environment interactions is widely recognized, we are still lacking an integrated mechanistic and evolutionary understanding of how gene-environment interactions shape development and how they impact evolutionary processes....
We are working on mechanisms of spindle positioning and spindle elongation using a combination of molecular, evolutionnary and biophysical approaches in worm embryos....
We explore regulatory networks of several nematodes to get insights in the evolution process of these mechanisms: how are loss and/or duplication of genes affecting the functional dynamics? Just like comparative genomics has proven tremendously powerful for genome annotation, comparative systems biology should help us understand how complex systems are modified, at the molecular level, throughout evolution to create diversity while preserving their main emerging properties....
We are using C. elegans as a model organism to dissect the biological role of genes associated with neurodevelopmental disorders such as epilepsy, autism and mental retardation....
Most differentiated cells are refractory to induced direct cell fate switches. We aim to identify mechanisms that regulate the reprogramming of cells by directly converting a specific cell fate such as an epithelial or intestinal cell into, e.g., neurons or muscle cells in vivo....
The maintenance of the redox homeostasis is critical for the survival of all organisms and its alterations underlay many human pathologies. The thioredoxin and glutaredoxin systems are two of the major system involved in the maintenance of the redox homeostasis....
Our lab works about the genetic of the aging process. More specifically, we study the links between nutrition, reproduction, lipid metabolism and lifespan. Indeed, all of these processes are closely intertwined, yet little is known about the way they interconnect....
My main research interest is to determine the spatial arrangement and temporal activity of the genetic material in the Caenorhabditis elegans cell nucleus and to understand how these impact gene regulation and hence, cell differentiation....