François Guidicelli
After twenty years spent between the bench and the microscope, dissecting the reciprocal interactions between molecular regulations and embryonic development, I joined IBENS in october 2018 to start studying life from an entirely new perspective, that of comparative genomics, and by wholly different methods, those of bio-informatics.
Raised near Paris, I initially graduated as an engineer at the Ecole Polytechnique in the mid-90s. I then embarked on a career in experimental research in biology with a PhD in Patrick Charnay’s lab, already part of what would later become IBENS. There, I explored the roles of some transcription factors in the process of segmentation of the hindbrain in chicken and mouse embryos. I then went for a post-doc to the Cancer Research UK Institute in London, where, thanks to my mentor Julian Lewis, I discovered the tremendous opportunities that zebrafish embryos offered for the dissection of developmental molecular mechanisms. During these 3 years, I attempted to decipher the mechanisms of the somitogenic clock, which governs the periodic and harmonious formation of somites - characteristic segments of the vertebrate body plan. I came back to Paris in 2005, with a position at Université Pierre et Marie Curie, in what is now the Institut de Biologie Paris-Seine (IBPS). There, with Sylvie Schneider-Maunoury, I continued to work on the elucidation of the links between gene expression and developmental processes, focusing on development of the the nervous system, still taking advantage of the ever growing number of experimental genetic approaches offered by the zebrafish model and trying to develop novel ones. Initially interested in the regulation of transcription during early regionalisation of the neural plate and neurogenic specification, I then turned to the study of post-transcriptional regulation, working on messenger RNA that is localised and translated within growing axons.
Over the years, I realised that the necessarily reductionist point-of-view that prevailed in my field came more and more at odds with my need to conceive a more integrated and global vision of the links between gene regulation and biological processes. Meanwhile, the tremendous technical advances related to DNA sequencing were giving access to huge, previously unexplored, domains of genomics science. Fascinated by these advances and by the abundance of novel concepts - many of which yet to be invented - that they called forth, I ended up willing to participate in this exploration. That is how I joined te ’Functional Genomics’ section of IBENS, in Hugues Roest Crollius’s ’DyoGen’ lab, dedicated to the study of dynamics and evolution of genomes. Here, I will using comparative genomics to reconstruct ancestral networks of gene regulation and describe how they evolved in extant vertebrate phyla.
