Oral and poster presentation prizes awarded during the 2023 FrenchBIC Meeting

Aude Salamé is a 2 nd year PhD student at the Laboratoire d’Electrochimie Moléculaire (LEM, Université Paris Cité). She works under the supervision of Dr. Elodie Anxolabéhère-Mallart and Prof. Marc Robert on the mechanistic investigation of CO2 electro-reduction to CO catalyzed by iron porphyrins. Her goal is mainly to identify reaction intermediates by means of spectro-electrochemical techniques. Among them, mid-infrared spectro-electrochemistry allows the detection of Fe X-C=O bonds, where X refers to the oxidation state of the iron center. Identifying the intermediates in the CO2 electrocatalytic reduction to CO enables a deeper understanding of its mechanistic route, essential to the design of more efficient molecular catalysts operating under mild conditions.

Ingie ELCHENNAWI is a pharmacist and did a Master’s Degree in Drug Design in Aix-Marseille University. She’s particularly interested in drug discovery to beat antibiotic resistance. She is currently a 2nd year PhD student in BIOCAT team, in the laboratory of Chemistry and Biology of Metals in CEA grenoble, supervised by Dr. Sandrine Ollagnier De Choudens. She’s currently working on the characterization of the SUF machinery of Mycobacterium Tuberculosis ( the most killing infectious agent worldwide ). The SUF machinery is the one and only machinery responsible for iron-sulfur clusters biogenesis in M. tuberculosis. The aim of the project is to find new molecules able to inhibit the protein-protein interactions within this machinery. In FrenchBic 2023, she presented an oral communication entitled “Structural and biochemical characterization of SufS and SufU from M. tuberculosis ”.

Lama SHAMSEDDINE received a master’s in microbiology and infectious diseases from University Grenoble Alpes. She is a third-year PhD student between the Laboratory of Chemistry and Biology of Metals (LCBM) in the CEA of Grenoble and the Institute of Molecular Sciences of Marseille (iSm2) under the supervision of Dr. Michael Lafond and Dr. Victor Duarte. Her work focuses on the biochemical and functional characterization of antimicrobial sactipeptides (peptides with thioether bonds) and their corresponding Radical-SAM enzymes. Her presentation at the FrenchBic 2023  was entitled “Biochemical, Functional, and Structural Characterization of the RuminococcinC1-5 Antimicrobial Peptides” and focused on a structure-function relationship study that led to the identification of essential amino acid residues for the peptidic activity.

Andrea Fasano is an Italian PhD student in the BIP (Bioénergétique et Ingénierie des Protéines) laboratories in Marseille, supervised by Prof. Christophe Léger. His PhD project focuses on electrochemical studies of hydrogenases, metallo-enzymes able to catalyse both hydrogen oxidation and evolution. He presented a work entitled “Chimeric hydrogenase complexes: a new strategy to study structure function relationships”, in which a chimeric NiFe hydrogenase, composed of 2 subunits belonging to two different NiFe hydrogenases, has been electrochemically characterized and compared with the WT enzymes. This allowed the assignment of specific catalytic properties (directionality and O2 tolerance) to the different subunits of these enzymes. Doi: 10.1021/jacs.3c06895

Rebecca Leblay is a second year PhD student at the molecular sciences instute in Marseille (iSm2, BiosCiences), supervized by Dr. A. Jalila Simaan and Dr. Bruno Faure. Her research focuses on the valorisation of recalcitrant biomass thanks to the use of bioinspired complexes. She presented a poster on the comparative study of 4 complexes from the characterization to the implementation of screening tests and mechanistic investigations.

Gaspard TOULIS is a Master 2 internship student at the BIP laboratory (Bioénergétique et Ingénierie des Protéines) in Marseille, in the Biophysics of Metalloproteins team, under the supervision of Batoul SOUR and Bénédicte BURLAT. His master 2 internship project concerns the characterization of a new family of glycine/cysteine-rich iron-sulfur proteins from giant viruses. His poster focused on the “in vitro chemical Fe-S reconstitution experiments in glycine/cysteine-rich proteins from Megavirinae giant viruses.

See the 2023 picture gallery