Yasmine Amrani is elected President of the IGBMC doctoral and post-doctoral students' association
Yasmine Amrani was elected President of the Student and Postdoc Board of the IGBMC on 8 February 2022. As a 2nd year IMCBio PhD student, Yasmine Amrani wishes to take advantage of her mandate to resume events that had to be stopped due to the sanitary crisis, such as poster sessions, meetings with professionals from the biology community as well as to launch projects to facilitate exchanges between IGBMC members.
Objective of the new presidency: to relaunch the activities of the SPB and make communication more dynamic
Yasmine Amrani was elected President of the SPB on 8 February alongside Daniel Sampaio Goncalves, from the Bill Keyes team, and Ruben Mercier, from the Gérard Gradwohl team. The latter two are respectively secretary and treasurer of the association.
As president, Yasmine Amrani hopes "to be able to resume events as the SPB did before the health crisis". In 2022, the SPB should organise scientific events, events with sponsors and convivial events. In particular, the SPB president "would like to reintroduce journal clubs, where one person comes up with a scientific article that can be discussed and debated with others".
Another important objective for the new SPB board is to "boost exchanges, both internally and externally", explains Yasmine Amrani. For the president, it is a question of "launching external collaborations, for example by inviting or involving other campus institutes such as the IBMC in certain activities" as well as "strengthening communication within the IGBMC between doctoral students, post-doctoral students and members of the institute in general". For this second point, the association is currently exploring the avenues available to them.
Founder of a scientific association with links to the IGBMC and IMCBio
The SPB is not the first association in which Yasmine Amrani is involved. In 2018, she was already founder and scientific project leader of the IGEM Strasbourg association.
The aim of this association was to participate in a scientific competition in synthetic biology organised by MIT in Boston, with over 300 teams competing. For this competition, each team must bring a scientific project completed in 9 months and present it to a panel of 6 international jurors. The IGEM Strasbourg team consisted of 15 students and 4 researchers, including Luc Bonnefond, from the Jean Caravelli team.
This competition had two important sides: the scientific side and the communication side. For this second aspect, Yasmine Amrani was able to count on the support of the IGBMC and IMCBio, which were two sponsors of this association. Their support allowed them to finance their registration (IMCBio), to produce communication materials thanks to the IGBMC's reprography service and to train in the auditorium in front of members of the institute.
Yasmine Amrani, PhD student specialising in the degradation of viral RNA
Yasmine Amrani graduated from the University of Bordeaux with a degree in biology and joined the "Molecular Genetics of Development and Stem Cells" master's programme at the University of Strasbourg in 2018. During this master's degree, directed by Vincent Leclerc, Nicolas Matt and Christelle Gally, she did her first internship at the IGBMC in 2019.
Now in her 2nd year of thesis, Yasmine Amrani is part of the IMCBio programme and is carrying out her PhD under the co-direction of Bertrand Séraphin's team and Sébastien Pfeffer's team at the IBMC. Her thesis focuses on the role of certain factors involved in RNA degradation during viral infection by RNA viruses. The aim of her research is to identify proteins whose role is to degrade RNA to prevent viral replication and potentially define therapeutic targets of interest.
To this end, she is studying the Sindbis virus, from the Alphavirus family. This family of viruses contains particularly dangerous viruses such as the Chikungunya virus or the Semliki Forest Virus. Yasmine Amrani's research could lead to the development of new treatment options to counteract these pathogens.