Congratulations Alexandre Vernay for his successful thesis defence!
This past Monday, April 24th 2017 Alexandre Vernay from the lab of Prof. Pierre Cosson successfully defended his thesis entitled “Role of TM9 proteins in intracellular transport and sorting of transmembrane domains”.
Alex joined the Cosson lab in 2012, where he was deeply engaged in discovering the function of poorly characterized human homologs of proteins identified from functional screens using the phagocytic cellular model organism Dictyostelium discoideum, including proteins involved in transmembrane proteins trafficking, through CRISPR/Cas9 genome editing. His work on two homologs of the TM9 family, TM9SF4 and TM9SF1, implicated in cell adhesion and cancer, showed that TM9 proteins act as sorting agents in the ER to Golgi transport of proteins whose transmembrane domain are of lower hydrophobicity, and in particular that the number of glycine residues served as a sorting signal that was recognized by these TM9 cargo receptors. In addition, he published a protocol outlining an improved two-step method for immunofluorescence staining of hard-to-label surface antigens in Dictyostelium discoideum. Alex also worked on proteins involved in the mitochondrial network dynamics.
In the future Alex plans to continue work in a science-related field in the private sector in Munich.
Congratulations and best wishes to Alex!
Psted by: P. Nunes-Hasler
9 May 2017