Date : 12/08/2011

Internship proposal for : Master 1 or Master 2

Laboratory
Laboratoire Interdisciplinaire de Physique
UMR5588 CNRS & Université Grenoble 1
140 av. de la Physique
38402 Saint Martin d'Hères
Website : http://www-liphy.ujf-grenoble.fr/-BIOP-?lang=en
Main discipline : Molecular Biology
Lab director : Thierry Dombre

Mentor
Olivier Rivoire
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tél : 04 76 51 47 64

Subjects
1.: Molecular evolution
2.: Biotechnology
3.: Theory of evolution

Tools and methodologies
1.: Phage display
2.: Molecular biology
3.: Mathematical analysis

Summary of lab's interests

We address fundamental questions in biology from a physicistís perspective, combining theoretical and experimental approaches. We investigate the role of stochasticity in genetic regulation and in the evolution of ecosystems, the effects of the evolutionary process on the features of living systems, and we develop new approaches both in synthetic biology and in the field of biomaterials.

Summary of project

Despite its fundamental importance in biology, the process of evolution is not easily studied experimentally with a precision and reproducibility that enable a quantitative comparison with theoretical models. Our group is developing an approach to perform quantitative molecular evolution by leveraging a powerful technique of molecular biology, called "phage display". This technique can select, out of a library of billions of different antibodies, the very few ones that bind to any particular molecular target. Supplemented with mutagenesis, it becomes a method to perform molecular evolution where nearly every parameter is tunable. We propose to learn to use this technique and to discover how it can be applied to address fundamental questions in evolution. The work will be mainly experimental, but the internship will also be an opportunity to be introduced to the issues of modeling and data analysis that are central to our approach.