Christophe Leterrier, leader of the NeuroCyto ATIP team, wrote a Spotlight in the Journal of Cell Biology highlighting a nice recent paper from the group of Pei-Lin Cheng in Taiwan. In this article, Lee et al. showed how degradation of the chloride transporter NKCC1 by proteasomes anchored at the AIS have a key role in lowering the intracellular chloride concentration, leading to the perinatal reversal of GABA effect from excitatory to inhibitory.

Thanks to her expertise in the diagnosis of central nervous system tumours arising in children and young adults, Dominique Figarella-Branger from the GlioME team (Team 8) was involved last year in 5 articles published in high-impact factor journals (>18). These articles are becoming references in this field:

- The molecular landscape of ETMR at diagnosis and relapse. Nature. 2019 Dec;576(7786):274-280. PMID: 31802000

Maladie d'Alzheimer : une nouvelle année pleine d'espoir. 

In its week-end edition (january the 4th & 5th 2020), the daily newspaper La Marseillaise devoted its "Provence Terre de Science" page to Alzheimer's disease reserach.

On this occasion François Devred (INP team 9 / PINT platform) answered a few questions on the molecular characterization of this complex protein (to be downloaded by clicking here )

First work of 2020 work is out for the NeuroCyto team! A collaboration with Matt Rasband’s lab in Nature Communications. This is a significant paper for the axon initial segment field: Matt’s lab used BioID of key AIS proteins for mapping AIS components. Dozens of new candidates for future studies! We performed super-resolution microscopy of several of the newly identified AIS components. IN particular, we showed that Mical3, a protein linking microtubules and actin, forms clusters along the AIS that are not periodically organized along the actin/spectrin scaffold.

If you speak French, you can listen to “La Méthode Scientifique”, a program on the France Culture radio which highlighted the recent Nature Communications article from the NeuroCyto team. 

You can go to the audio clip by following this link and learn more on the France Culture website.

Our work on the ultrastructure of the periodic actin/spectrin scaffold along axons is out in Nature Communications.

In a large cohort of 911 high-grade IDH-mutant gliomas from the French national POLA network, we investigated the prognostic value of the CDKN2A gene homozygous deletion as well as WHO grading criteria (mitoses, microvascular proliferation, and necrosis).

We showed that:
- CDKN2A homozygous deletion characterizes diffuse malignant IDH-mutant gliomas with worst outcome.

- Microvascular proliferation stratifies IDH-mutant gliomas lacking CDKN2A homozygous deletion.

On thursday december the 12th, most of INP and Vect-Horus members got together and spent a day in the Black Stone pub, Marseille, to celebrate the fact that nearly two years after its creation, the Institute of NeuroPhysiopathology is finally located on Tmone Campus.

Michel KHRESTCHATISKY, Director of the UMR7051 Institute of Neurophysiopathology at Aix-Marseille University / CNRS and co-founder of VECT-HORUS was invited at the third edition of “Translational neuroscience Day: challenges and opportunities” co-organized by DHUNE and NeurATRIS and hosted by BioFIT on December 10, 2019 (https://www.biofit-event.com/translational-neuroscience).

Maeva and Noé presented their poster at the SFNano C'Nano conference entitled "Preclinical evaluation of a paclitaxel nanoprodrug for glioblastoma therapy".