Marie Courçon

Atomic Energy and Alternative Energies Commission | CEA · Centre d'Etudes de Grenoble

Menstrual toxic shock syndrome (mTSS) is a rare life-threatening febrile illness that occurs in women using intravaginal menstrual protection. It is caused by toxic shock syndrome toxin 1 (TSST-1) produced by Staphylococcus aureus, triggering a sudden onset of rash and hypotension, subsequently leading to multiple organ failure. Detecting TSST-1 an...

Animal cells are active, contractile objects. While bioassays address the molecular characterization of cell contractility, the mechanical characterization of the active forces in cells remains challenging. Here by confronting theoretical analysis and experiments, we calculated both the resistive and the active components of the intracellular stres...

Cell rigidity sensing—a basic cellular process allowing cells to adapt to mechanical cues—involves cell capabilities exerting force on the extracellular environment. In vivo, cells are exposed to multi-scaled heterogeneities in the mechanical properties of the surroundings. Here, we investigate whether cells are able to sense micron-scaled stiffnes...

Animal cells are active, contractile objects. While bioassays address the molecular characterization of cell contractility, the mechanical characterization of the active forces in cells remains challenging. Here by confronting theoretical analysis, finite element modeling and experiments, we analyze the relevance of existing mechanical approaches a...

Invasive fungal infections cause significant morbidity and mortality among immunocompromised individuals, posing an urgent need for new antifungal therapeutic strategies. Here we investigate a chromatin-interacting module, the bromodomain (BD) from the BET family of proteins, as a potential antifungal target in Candida albicans, a major human funga...

Supplementary Figures, Supplementary Tables, Supplementary Methods and Supplementary References

Summary of peptide array data.

Vascular endothelial cadherin is the main component of adherens junctions enabling cohesion of the endothelial monolayer in vessels. The extracellular part of vascular endothelial cadherin (VE-cadherin) can be cleaved, releasing soluble fragments in blood (sVE-cadherin). In some diseases with endothelial dysfunction, a correlation between increased...

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Confining cells on adhesive patterns allows performing robust, weakly dispersed, statistical analysis. A priori, adhesive patterns could be efficient tools to analyze intracellular cell stress fields, in particular when patterns are used to force the geometry of the cytoskeleton. This tool could then be very helpful in deciphering the relationship...

Adherens junctions are required for vascular endothelium integrity. These structures are formed by the clustering of the homophilic adhesive protein VE-cadherin, which recruits intracellular partners, such as β- and α-catenins, vinculin, and actin filaments. The dogma according to which α-catenin bridges cadherin·β-catenin complexes to the actin cy...

Adherens junctions are required for vascular endothelium integrity. These structures are formed by the clustering of the homophilic adhesive protein VE-cadherin, which recruits intracellular partners, such as β- and α-catenins, vinculin, and actin filaments. The dogma according to which α-catenin bridges cadherin·β-catenin complexes to the actin cy...

Endothelial cells express two different classical cadherins, vascular endothelial (VE) cadherin and neural (N) cadherin, having distinct functions in the vascular system. VE-cadherin is specific to endothelial adherens junctions and is strictly necessary for vascular morphogenesis. On the contrary, N-cadherin shows diffuse localization on the cell...

Cyclodipeptides and their derivatives belong to the diketopiperazine (DKP) family, which is comprised of a broad array of natural products that exhibit useful biological properties. In the few known DKP biosynthetic pathways, nonribosomal peptide synthetases (NRPSs) are involved in the synthesis of cyclodipeptides that constitute the DKP scaffold,...

The gene encoding the cytochrome P450 CYP121 is essential for Mycobacterium tuberculosis. However, the CYP121 catalytic activity remains unknown. Here, we show that the cyclodipeptide cyclo(l-Tyr-l-Tyr) (cYY) binds to CYP121, and is efficiently converted into a single major product in a CYP121 activity assay containing spinach ferredoxin and ferred...

Human KIN17 is a 45-kDa eukaryotic DNA- and RNA-binding protein that plays an important role in nuclear metabolism and in particular in the general response to genotoxics. Its amino acids sequence contains a zinc finger motif (residues 28-50) within a 30-kDa N-terminal region conserved from yeast to human, and a 15-kDa C-terminal tandem of SH3-like...

Many studies that aim to characterize the proteome structurally or functionally require the production of pure protein in a high-throughput format. We have developed a fast and flexible integrated system for cloning, protein expression in Escherichia coli, solubility screening and purification that can be completely automated in a 96-well microplat...

DsbA is the strongest protein disulfide oxidant yet known and is involved in catalyzing protein folding in the bacterial periplasm. Its strong oxidizing power has been attributed to the lowered pKa of its reactive active site cysteine and to the difference in thermodynamic stability between the oxidized and the reduced form. However, no structural...

The aim of this work was to produce and to label snake neurotoxins, disulfide-rich proteins. A mutant of a snake toxin, erabutoxin a, was used as a model. Its N-terminal part was fused to ZZ, a synthetic IgG-binding domain of protein A (B. Nilssonet al.,1987,Protein Eng.1, 107–113), thus preventing degradation in the bacterial cytoplasm and providi...