Associate Professor at Université Paris-Saclay - I2BC, my research aims at investigating the strategies undertaken by organisms to adapt to their environments. Molecular innovation involves different parts of biological networks: novel nodes (e.g. novel genes and their associated protein products) or novel edges between novel or old genes/proteins. On the other hand, molecular innovation relies on deeply interconnected levels: the genomic level and the protein level. Indeed, the evolution of genomes shapes the proteome universe while the selection operates on protein structure and interactions, shaping in turn the genome's structure and content. Finally, molecular innovation is inherently associated with a competition between non established products/interactions (i.e. novel products and interactions) and the established, selected and regulated ones.
These non established products/interactions display different properties from those for which current methods have been developed. Their characterization certainly represents one of the future challenges of biology since it requires the definition of novel methods at each level (DNA, RNA and peptide/protein | products/interactions) and more importantly, there is no doubt today that the world of non established products plays a role in the evolution of organisms but also in the development of pathologies.
We therefore try to investigate these different "objects" (genes/proteins as products along with their interactions) with integrative approaches that rely on OMICS data, genomics and structural bioinformatics. In particular, we develop novel methods and novel representation frameworks that enable the representation and characterization of the established products (genes/proteins and functional protein interactions) but also that of the potential novel products/interactions of an organism (ORFs hosted in noncoding regions and their associated properties (including translation activity) and nonfunctional (including promiscuous) interactions between non functional partners).
