Located on the Luminy campus, IBDM employs around 220 permanent researchers, lecturers, engineers and technicians, as well as non-permanent staff on fixed-term contracts, post-docs, PhD students and trainees, spread across 21 research teams and 11 technical platforms and services. IBDM is a joint research unit under the supervision of CNRS and AMU, exploring the field of developmental biology and associated pathologies. You will work in the "Mechanisms of gene regulation by transcription factors" team, led by Yacine GRABA and Andrew SAURIN. As the laboratory is made up of several nationalities, English is a must.

Studying the transcriptional control of adult myogenesis in Drosophila. Considerable progress has been made in regenerative medicine to generate muscle cells. However, it is still not possible to create specific muscle types corresponding to a given location in the body, as it is not known how a muscle acquires its unique properties in the developmental space. It is widely accepted that Drosophila myogenesis recapitulates all the major events in muscle development that are also at work in vertebrates, such as progenitor specification, myoblast migration and fusion, muscle attachment to tendon cells or the assembly of contractile sarcomeres. This thesis project aims to determine how Hox transcription factors control the identity and development of two very distinct muscle types located along the anteroposterior axis of a developing organism, using Drosophila as a model. The project will use whole-genome profiling approaches to determine how Hox factors specify and coordinate the correct development of the flight and leg muscles of adult Drosophila, two major muscle types that enable adult locomotion. This thesis will provide an unprecedented high-resolution view of the development-related transcriptional regulation and structural properties of muscle fibers in a developing organism, and shed new light on the mechanisms determining muscle identity, type and repair.