Annuaire
Our research goals
Animal microRNAs (miRNAs) are short non-coding RNAs of 20–24 nucleotides that bind Argonaute (AGO) proteins forming miRNA-induced silencing complex (miRISC) and mediate repression of target mRNAs. miRNAs are involved in virtually every cellular process and are essential for animal development, cell differentiation and homeostasis; deregulation of miRNA function is often linked to human diseases. Until recently, miRNA functions have been studied by correlation-based approaches, which have identified individual miRNA-mRNA interactions implicating the de-repression of these single targets as the primary cause of an abnormal phenotype. Nevertheless, miRNAs generally produce a much more complex, combinatorial regulation of gene expression required to robustly respond to environmental challenges, genetic perturbations, or stochastic variations of gene expression. The complexity of such combinatorial regulation by different miRNAs is just beginning to be disentangled. Combining state-of-the-art fluorescent single-molecule approaches, high-throughput biochemistry, single-cell sequencing and mathematical modeling, we aim at elucidating how miRNA functionality is affected by a dynamic intracellular environment such as that occurring in cells of the innate immune system upon activation, and how miRNA regulatory network modulates the inflammatory response.
