Marie-Paule Felder-Schmittbuhl

Fellowship 2014

ARCHIVE

Marie-Paule Felder is a CNRS assistant professor at the Institute for Cellular and Integrative Neurosciences in Strasbourg. She’s got a molecular biology and biochemistry training acquired at the Ecole Normale Supérieure de Cachan and a PhD in Virology from the University Paris 7 obtained in 1994. She started her research carrier in the laboratory of Dr Calothy, at the Curie Institute, where she studied cellular and retrovirally-induced oncogenic processes by using as a model the retina. Her activity later focused on a family of nuclear oncogenes, the Maf/Nrl transcription factors, playing various roles in development, in particular in the eye. Since she joined the Neurobiology of Rhythms Department in Strasbourg in 2005, she’s been investigating how vision adapts to the day/night cycle. Therefore, she is studying the tissue and cellular-level organization and molecular mechanisms of the circadian clock located in the retina, as well as its target genes required for retina survival and function.

Light regulation of retinal clocks: from cell to visual function

Post-doc: Nadia Mazzaro

Living organisms have developed endogenous mechanisms for time-tracking in accordance with the period of Earth rotation around its axis that allow life adaptation to the day/night cycle. This is based on circadian clocks (~24 h period), a sort of molecular pacemakers housed in virtually every cell in vertebrates, and which govern the timely organization of behavior, cellular and physiological functions around the day/night cycle. At the level of organisms, these clocks work in a hierarchical manner, conducted by a “central” clock located in the hypothalamus. The retina holds a special place in this network, since it is required for synchronization to the day/night cycle, by detecting and encoding environmental light intensity and informing the central clock about the time of day. The retina also harbors a circadian clock that times its physiology over 24 h and allows optimization of visual function in an environment which light intensity can vary over one billion-fold between night and day. We have been characterizing, since a few years, the downstream molecular processes and the tissue-level organization of the retina circadian clock. We showed that the retina contains a network of several oscillators and our project, in collaboration with the laboratory of Dr Dkhissi-Benyahya (Institut Cellule Souche et Cerveau, INSERM U846, Lyon), aims at understanding how light impacts on these clocks to synchronize retina functions to the 24 h cycle.