PhD in experimental and computational biology (M/F): Does regeneration re-use developmental gene regulatory networks?

The recruited student will join the Development, Regeneration and Evolution team of the Institut de Génomique Fonctionnelle de Lyon (www.averof-lab.org), located at the campus of the École Normale Supérieure de Lyon in the south of Lyon, France. The IGFL provides a stimulating environment focusing on the interfaces of animal development, physiology and evolution. The research team is international and the working language is English.

The recruited student will be enrolled as a PhD student in the École Normale Supérieure de Lyon, and will be co-supervised by Mathilde Paris and Michalis Averof. S/he will receive training in single-cell genomics (scRNAseq and scATACseq), bioinformatics including handling/analysis of single-cell datasets and modeling of GRNs, as well as transgenesis and live imaging.

The project involves a collaboration with Arnau Sebe Pedros at the Centre for Genomic Regulation (CRG) in Barcelona. The project is funded by the ANR grant Replay.

A fully funded PhD project is available at the Institut de Génomique Fonctionnelle de Lyon (IGFL), in France, to discover and compare the gene regulatory networks (GRNs) that drive leg development and regeneration in the crustacean model Parhyale hawaiensis. Our team has established transgenic, live imaging and genomics approaches to study leg regeneration in Parhyale. We have previously shown that although regeneration yields faithful replicas of the original legs, the transcriptional and cellular dynamics associated with leg development and regeneration are different. These results suggest that identical structures could be generated by distinct mechanisms during development and regeneration. Our project takes a single-cell omics approach to explore this question by unraveling and comparing the GRNs that underpin leg development and regeneration.

The project will involve both experimental and computational work, including generating scRNAseq and scATACseq data from developing and regenerating legs, computational processing of these data to reconstruct and compare GRNs, and transgenesis to validate key GRN nodes in vivo.

Additional information can be found on the following link: https://www.averof-lab.org/pages/replay