Jean-Luc Imler

Fellowship 2014

ARCHIVE

Jean-Luc Imler, obtained his MSc degree from AgroParisTech in Paris in 1985 and his PhD from Strasbourg university in 1988. He then joined the DNAX Research Institute in Palo Alto, CA in 1989 for his post-doctoral training. Returning to France in 1992, he first worked as a research scientist in the biotech company Transgene, before being appointed Professor of cell biology at the University of Strasbourg in 1994.

After becoming an independent scientist, J.-L. Imler joined as a group leader the Insect immunity Department chaired by Jules Hoffmann to work on the model organism drosophila. He first characterized the function and regulation of Toll, an evolutionarily conserved receptor playing a key role in the activation of innate immunity before switching, in 2002, to the study of antiviral immunity in drosophila.

Jean-Luc Imler is interested in evolutionarily conserved aspects of antiviral immunity, collaborating with the groups of Bruce Beutler (UT Southwestern, Dallas) and Shizuo Akira (Osaka University, Japan), to study in mice the orthologues of the genes identified in flies. J.-L. Imler’s team also recently started to collaborate with Pr. J. T. Marques (UFMG, Belo-Horizonte) in Brazil to investigate interactions between mosquitoes and the viruses they can transmit to humans, such as Dengue or Chikungunya.

Antiviral innate immunity : from the Drosophila model to the vector mosquito Aedes aegypti

Dengue virus and other arthropod-borne viruses (arboviruses) have a major impact on human public health worldwide. The insect vector is a central component of the transmission cycle of arboviruses and a promising target for intervention. The goal of this project is to decipher the mechanisms of antiviral immunity in mosquitoes, which can affect both vector survival and virus replication. The project aims at translating findings made in the laboratory model Drosophila to Aedes mosquitoes.

Results from the fly model indicate that antiviral immunity in insects involves RNA interference, but also the evolutionarily conserved innate immunity pathways Toll, IMD and Jak/STAT. We will use high-throughput sequencing of long and small RNA libraries to analyze the contribution of these pathways to resistance to the arbovirus Dengue virus (DENV) in Aedes vector mosquitoes. These experiments will be conducted in collaboration with Pr. Joao Trindade-Marques at UFMG (Belo-Horizonte) in Brazil.