At the IGF, researcher Stéphanie Trouche and researcher Philippe Rondard are among the 22 winning projects in Inserm’s new international calls for projects.

Stéphanie Trouche is the recipient of the 2020 First step project grant (“Tremplin international”) that aims to initiate a collaboration between a young INSERM researcher and a foreign team (J. Felsenberg, Friedrich Miescher Institute for Biomedical Research FMI,Switzerland). This funding will allow to gather new insights on common mechanisms across many species, fear reconsolidation and extinction.

The proposed project called DopaMisMatch will therefore study general principles of how normal and pathological memories can be strengthen/weakened by targeting precise neuronal circuits in the brain of two elaborated animal models for neural circuit research. Stephanie is an INSERM principal Investigator and joined the team of Emmanuel Valjent in April 2018. The backbone of her projects is to study where and how appetitive and aversive memories interact in the brain, focusing on discrete active cell ensembles called fear engrams. Her collaboration with J. Felsenberg is the result of their multiple interaction during their postdoctoral training in Oxford, both having published in the field of fear and extinction memories.

The five-year International Research Project (IRP) from INSERM will strenghten the long-term collaboration between the team headed by Philippe Rondard and Prof. J. Liu’s laboratory (Huazhong University, Wuhan, China). Altogether, they lead a Sino-French laboratory set up in Wuhan. The two teams are expert in the molecular and cellular mechanisms of the metabotropic glutamate (mGlu) receptors and GABA-B receptor, important drug targets to control the synaptic transmission.

They have recently discovered that the mGlu receptors form heterodimers (composed of two different mGlu subunits) in the brain. This IRP project will help to develop a new program on these receptors with three specific aims and promising preliminary data :
1) To elucidate the 3D structure of the mGlu and GABA-B receptors in complex with G protein by electronic microscopy ;
2) To clarify the function of mGlu heterodimers in the brain ;
3) To develop single domain antibodies (nanobodies) to target these heterodimers and validate nanobodies as therapeutic drugs in brain diseases such as schizophrenia.

Discover the 22 winning projects of Inserm’s new international calls