H/F PhD position, Role of actin, adhesion complxes and mechanical forces in cell extrusion...

Our group is part of the Institut Jacques Monod (https://www.ijm.fr ), which is housed in a brand new building on the new Paris campus. The Institut Jacques Monod is one of the leading public centers for basic research in biology in Paris and offers a state-of-the-art research environment. It offers a rich, multidisciplinary environment, as well as access to different experimental approaches in our laboratory and technological platforms to ensure proper development of the research. The thesis will be supervised by Benoit Ladoux, team leader at IJM and co-supervised by RM. Mège.

Epithelial cell sheets act as a covering for most of the internal and external surfaces of the body. While the epithelial barrier function needs to be maintained, epithelial cells are constantly challenged by their environment, which can lead to cell elimination. Understanding how cell fate -live, death, or transformed- is determined within epithelia and how this leads to the competition and/or extrusion of cells from the epithelium is key to understanding important homeostatic and pathologic processes such as aging and cancer development. Recent studies including ours have shed light on the crucial coupling of cell shape, collective cell behaviors and mechanical stress to biochemical signaling for cell extrusion and delamination, but a great deal remains to be elucidated. The role of adhesion complexes and cytoskeletons in relation with mechanical forces on the fate of extruded cells is largely unexplored. Here, we thus propose to addpress the impact of mechanical forces on cell organization and extrusion processes.
We will study how extrusion is influenced by external force application on epithelia, and how cells respond to different rates and types of force application (shear, compression, or stretch). Our project involves a multidisciplinary approach combining microfabrication, experimental cell biology, functional live cell imaging, tissue dynamics, computational image processing and biophysical approaches.