Antoine Danchin
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FFAS, Professor extraordinary, Institute of Cardiometabolism and Nutrition, CHU Pitié-Salpêtrière.
Mathematician and physicist, AD moved into experimental microbiology in the early seventies. To understand the rules of gene organisation in Bacteria, AD spearheaded in 1985 a collaboration with computer scientists to bring artificial intelligence techniques into the study of integrated problems in molecular genetics. This convinced him that time was ripe for exploring genomes as wholes, with the help of a decisive effort in computer sciences (in silico biology). In 1987 he put forward the sequencing of the genome of a model bacterium, Bacillus subtilis. This advice was shaped in 1988 into an European collaboration, supported by Japan from 1990 and completed in 1997. The first unexpected discovery of this work was, in 1991, that many genes (at the time, half of the genes) were of entirely unknown function. A great many of these genes are involved in processes leading to occupation of a particular niche, and are therefore essential for pathogenicity and virulence. Recently, his work established that genomes are organised into a core genome coding for functions reminiscent of the origin of life, the paleome, and a set of genes, the cenome, permitting the organism to occupy a particular niche. The paleome comprises genes essential to support life and genes necessary to propagate life, making living organisms information traps. This is at the heart of the contribution of AD to Synthetic Biology. AD authored 360 scientific articles and 200 articles in the domain of epistemology, ethics and popularisation of Science. He has published four books, including a book on the origin of life and a book on genomes (The Delphic Boat, Harvard University Press, 2003). He has a continuous interest in exchanges with other civilisations (creation of a Chinese-European University Without Walls in 1990, Umberto Eco, chairman). This triggered his interest to promote genome research in Hong Kong, creating the HKU-Pasteur Research Centre Ltd in 2000 and setting up, with the support of the government of Hong Kong, a bioinformatics infrastructure for genomics. A former research director at the CNRS, honorary professor of the Faculty of Medicine of HKU and head of a Research Unit (Genetics of Bacterial Genomes) at the Institut Pasteur in Paris, he was the director of the Department Genomes and Genetics there and member of the Board of Directors of the Institut. He is Honorary professor at the BGI in Shenzhen (China) and President and Chief Scientific Officer of AMAbiotics SAS, a company focusing on advanced microbiome medicine acting on chronic stresses (ageing included), to help patients on long-term drug treatment to overcome the secondary effects of drugs as well as propose remedies to the ravages of age.
Supervisors: Marianne Grunberg-Manago FFAS, USNAS and Mildred Cohn USNAS
FFAS, Professor extraordinary, Institute of Cardiometabolism and Nutrition, CHU Pitié-Salpêtrière.
Mathematician and physicist, AD moved into experimental microbiology in the early seventies. To understand the rules of gene organisation in Bacteria, AD spearheaded in 1985 a collaboration with computer scientists to bring artificial intelligence techniques into the study of integrated problems in molecular genetics. This convinced him that time was ripe for exploring genomes as wholes, with the help of a decisive effort in computer sciences (in silico biology). In 1987 he put forward the sequencing of the genome of a model bacterium, Bacillus subtilis. This advice was shaped in 1988 into an European collaboration, supported by Japan from 1990 and completed in 1997. The first unexpected discovery of this work was, in 1991, that many genes (at the time, half of the genes) were of entirely unknown function. A great many of these genes are involved in processes leading to occupation of a particular niche, and are therefore essential for pathogenicity and virulence. Recently, his work established that genomes are organised into a core genome coding for functions reminiscent of the origin of life, the paleome, and a set of genes, the cenome, permitting the organism to occupy a particular niche. The paleome comprises genes essential to support life and genes necessary to propagate life, making living organisms information traps. This is at the heart of the contribution of AD to Synthetic Biology. AD authored 360 scientific articles and 200 articles in the domain of epistemology, ethics and popularisation of Science. He has published four books, including a book on the origin of life and a book on genomes (The Delphic Boat, Harvard University Press, 2003). He has a continuous interest in exchanges with other civilisations (creation of a Chinese-European University Without Walls in 1990, Umberto Eco, chairman). This triggered his interest to promote genome research in Hong Kong, creating the HKU-Pasteur Research Centre Ltd in 2000 and setting up, with the support of the government of Hong Kong, a bioinformatics infrastructure for genomics. A former research director at the CNRS, honorary professor of the Faculty of Medicine of HKU and head of a Research Unit (Genetics of Bacterial Genomes) at the Institut Pasteur in Paris, he was the director of the Department Genomes and Genetics there and member of the Board of Directors of the Institut. He is Honorary professor at the BGI in Shenzhen (China) and President and Chief Scientific Officer of AMAbiotics SAS, a company focusing on advanced microbiome medicine acting on chronic stresses (ageing included), to help patients on long-term drug treatment to overcome the secondary effects of drugs as well as propose remedies to the ravages of age.
Supervisors: Marianne Grunberg-Manago FFAS, USNAS and Mildred Cohn USNAS
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