Members of DoME team:
Henri-François RENARD, PhD
PI of DOME team (see this page).
Natacha ZANIN, PhD
Postdoc
Natacha did her PhD at the Institut Curie in Paris (France) in the lab of Dr Christophe Lamaze. She then moved to the Kennedy Institute of Rheumatology - University of Oxford (UK), in the lab of Prof Claudia Monaco. All along her scientific career, she developed a strong interest and expertise in questions related to the interplay between membrane traffic and signaling. In the DoME team, she is trying to decipher how signaling can be modulated by unconventional endocytosis.
Emilie RIGAUX
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Emilie did her biology studies at UMons (Belgium). She was recently hired as a doctoral assistant at UNamur. Since September 2020, she shares her time between the organization of practical works for students and research in our lab. Her project will tackle the role of clathrin-independent endocytosis in cancer cell migration.
PhD student
PhD student
Shiqiang XU
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Shiqiang holds a bachelor in medical sciences from Shanghai Jiao-Tong University (China) and a master in cancer biology from Université Lyon 1 (France). His research experiences provided him with a strong immunology background. His PhD project is co-supervized by UNamur and UCLouvain. He will work at the interface of immunology and cell biology, trying to understand how clathrin-independent endocytosis affects cancer cell immunogenicity.
Associate members of DoME team in Louvain-la-Neuve (UCLouvain / LIBST), in the lab of Prof. Pierre MORSOMME:
François did a brilliant master thesis in our team in 2016. With his work focused on the role of BAR domain proteins in clathrin-independent endocytosis, he contributed to the very first development of my projects in the lab as I was coming back from Paris. In 2017, he graduated with a master's degree in biology after a last internship at the Institut Curie (Paris, France) in the team of Philippe CHAVRIER. There, he studied the dynamics of metalloprotease-containing endosomes and their interactions with invadopodial plasma membrane in invasive breast cancer cells. Back to our lab, he brilliantly obtained a FRIA PhD Fellowship and is currently working on a new clathrin-independent endocytic modality controlled by a BAR domain protein that we recently discovered.
François TYCKAERT
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PhD student
Benjamin LEDOUX
Benjamin is a bio-engineer and obtained a FRIA PhD Fellowship in 2018. He chose our lab to initiate a new and very interdisciplinary project led in collaboration with the team of Prof. Christine DUPONT. The lab of Christine at the IMCN (Institute of Condensed Matter and Nanosciences) of our university is specialized in surface physico-chemistry, and more particularly in the production of nanostructured surfaces. During this very interdisciplinary project, Benjamin will develop new nanostructured surfaces for cell culture, with the aim to artificially induce plasma membrane deformations and study the recruitment of various BAR domain proteins in the environment of these deformations. On a longer term, the aim is to combine the use of these surfaces with atomic force microscopy (collaboration with the team of Dr. David Alsteens from our institute), where the probe could be used to induce transient and dynamic plasma membrane deformations. This project will allow to understand how BAR domain proteins operate/coordinate in mechano-sensing/-transduction of nanometer-scale deformations of plasma membrane.
PhD student
Camille is a pharmacist and arrived in the lab in 2018. After one year of FSR PhD Fellowship, she brilliantly obtained a FRIA PhD Fellowship in 2019. Since her arrival in the lab, she performed an incredible quantitative proteomic work in order to indentify new couples of cargoes and BAR domain proteins at the plasma membrane, that could constitute new clathrin-independent endocytic pathways. She identified very interesting hits, on which she is currently working.
Camille LEMAIGRE
PhD student