IGBMC : Institut de la Génétique et de la Biologie Moléculaire et Cellulaire

The international team coordinated by Imre Berger (EMBL) and Làszlò Tora (IGBMC) just demonstrated that the TFIID transcription factor, which controls the gene transcription in eukaryote cells, starts to assemble in building blocks in the cytoplasm before penetrating into the nucleus.

These results - published January 14, 2015 in Nature Communications - open up a new way for research on gene regulation and defects during transcription.

Having identified precisely how vitamin D binds to its receptor, a study coordinated by Natacha Rochel and Dino Moras (Department of Integrated Structural Biology, IGBMC) and Daniel Metzger (Department of Functional Genomics and Cancer, IGBMC) explains the severe skeletal defects of patients carrying mutations of this receptor and osteoporosis due to vitamin D deficiency.

The researchers indeed showed that the absence of Vitamin D binding to its receptor leads to a more severe calcium deficiency than in the absence of receptor. Their results, published on January 22nd 2015 in Cell Reports, also pave a way to identify Vitamin D analogs for the treatment of various pathologies like osteoporosis, neuro-degenerative and autoimmune diseases, as well as cancer.

It has been known for nearly 60 years that RNA has the same potential as DNA to hybridize into a double helix.

However, in human cells the presence of stable double-stranded RNAs exerting biological roles that are critically dependent on this structure had never been experimentally demonstrated.

A study coordinated by Maximiliano Portal and Hinrich Gronemeyer at the IGBMC reports the existence of an entirely new class of stable non-coding double-stranded RNAs (termed 'ndsRNAs' for natural double-strand RNAs) which are naturally present in the nucleus of cells and regulate key cellular processes, such as cell division.

These results were published on December 15th in the journal Nature Structural and Molecular Biology.

This publication has been recommended in F1000Prime as being of special significance in its field.
 

The Integrated Structural Biology (ISB) department of IGBMC is recruiting new group leaders with support from the Laboratory of Excellence (LabEx) initiative.
Research teams in the department address fundamental biological questions of major importance for human health and diseases, mainly in the field of eukaryotic gene expression at the transcriptional level (basal transcriptional machinery, transcriptional activators and co-regulators, histone modifiers, chromatin structure, DNA topology, epigenetics) and at the translational level (RNA stability, protein synthesis, ribosome structure).
Our aim is to unveil the 3D structure of macromolecular complexes and understanding its relationship to invivo functions via an integrated multi-scale approach.
To strengthen and expand its research, the ISB department welcomes applications for team leader positions.

For the first time, the team of Gérard Gradwohl, Inserm research leader at the Institute of Genetics and Molecular and Cellular Biology of Illkirch (IGBMC / Inserm-CNRS-Université of Strasbourg) shows that Rfx6 gene is essential for pancreatic beta cell function. In adult mice, this gene turns out to be important for the secretion of insulin as well as for the maintenance of beta cell identity.

These results are published December 11th in Cell Reports.