MontpellierNODE

PIBBS-MARS & AFM comprises two facilities :

• The AFM facility is the only one in the FBI Infrastructure to provide access to state-of-the-art Atomic Force Microscopes, including a custom built high-speed AFM.
• The MARS facility is devoted to cutting-edge optical microscopies such as Single Molecule Localization Microscopy, smFRET, PIE-FCCS, 2-photons FCS, single particle tracking, etc… The MARS R&D division, closely associated to two R&D teams, is in charge of implementing and developing new custom
  advanced microscopies (such as STED-FCCS, 2foci-FCS or multifocal microscopy) before their transfer to the facility.

Moreover, the AFM and MARS facilities and staff work closely together to develop and transfer new correlative imaging modalities, such as AFM / Superresolution or AFM / Confocal (FLIM, spFRET).

Users are assisted by dedicated research engineers and scientific coordinators to define the best approach, experimental design, help in data acquisition and analysis.

http://www.cbs.cnrs.fr/index.php/fr/fluorescence

Microscopy systems available @PIBBS

We develop single-molecule and advanced microscopy methodologies to investigate the mechanisms underlying DNA segregation and remodeling in live cells.

Our current research projects:

Our research aims at characterizing macromolecular complexes governing major biological processes, focusing on transcription regulation, signaling and remodeling of biological membranes. To achieve these goals, we develop, combine and use advanced single molecule biophysical methods (such as atomic force and fluorescence microscopies), as well as DNA nanotechnology.

Research:

Structure and dynamics of nucleoproteic and membrane assemblies

• Prokariotic transcription termination
• Bacterial adaptation to environmental changes
• DNA nano-engineering

Structure and dynamics of membrane assemblies

• Remodeling and partition of membrane components
• Nanomechanics of cancer metastatis
• Mechanisms of nuclear pore complex assembly
• Structural dynamics of single metabotropic glutamate receptors
• Methodological developments

The ICAR Research-Team develops research themes combining the interaction and processing of visual data such as 2D, 3D, videos or nD+t image sequences and 3D meshes. The team is structured according to 3 research axes: Analysis & Processing which is focused on new low-level processing techniques of visual information, Multimedia Security which is interested in securing visual data and Modeling & Visualization which aims at representing large and complex visual data sets.

Expertise of the Team

• The Analysis & Processing axis is interested in new low-level information processing techniques to improve the information perceptible in the image and to take into account, within the same theoretical framework, the imprecise, uncertain and incomplete (the different types of error in
  visual data processing).
• The Multimedia Security axis is interested in the security of visual data. In order to ensure this security, coding algorithms are developed combining tattooing, steganography, forensics, encryption and authentication and often requiring robustness to compression.
• The objective of the Modeling & Visualization axis is to model large sets of complex data (in dimension and nature) in order to allow intuitive visualization or to manipulate these data to extract knowledge from them.

Our group has strong interests in gene expression mechanisms, from transcription to translation. While we are interested in the regulation of these processes and their functional consequences, the big question that moves us is to understand how they occur in the context of a living cell.

Indeed, cells are not only the individual units where gene regulation takes place, but they are also incredible objects: if we consider RNA and proteins, a typical cell contains several hundreds of thousands of different molecular species, with some present in millions of copies per cell while others in only few. In order to function with such a high complexity within a crowded molecular environment, cells rely on two main tools: (i) chaperones specialized in the control of molecular interactions; (ii) a remarkable degree of spatial organization, which also allows a high plasticity and a high dynamics of molecules. It is to get insights into these very fundamental questions that we first developed tools to image single mRNAs in live cells. With these tools in hands, and others that we developed later, we aim at imaging the basic mechanisms of gene expression directly in living cells, thereby providing a renewed vision of these fundamental processes.

Our strategy is to invest in methodological developments to access and image new facets of gene expression, usually at the levels of single molecules. These developments are mostly focused on imaging RNA metabolism and they are guided by our current scientific questions.

Methodological developments require multidisciplinary approaches, and we have therefore developed a stable network of collaborators who complement our own expertise. This includes the groups of: (i) C. Zimmer and F. Müller (Pasteur Institute, Paris; https://research.pasteur.fr/en/team/imaging-and-modeling/), a physicist team with a great expertise in image analysis; (ii) T. Walter (Curie/Ecole des Mines; Paris; http://members.cbio.mines-paristech.fr/~twalter/), an applied mathematician expert in high-content microscopy and in complex, high-dimensional dataset analysis; (iii) O. Radulescu (Montpellier University; https://systems-biology-lphi.cnrs.fr/), a mathematician expert in modeling biological processes. More recently, we initiated collaborations with chemists to develop novel RNA probes and biosensors.

Our group works in three main areas: transcriptional and translational regulation, as well as chaperone-mediated control of molecular interactions.