Section: Bilateral Contracts and Grants with Industry

Bilateral grants with industry

Fourmentin-Guilbert Foundation: Macromolecule detection in cryo-electron tomograms

Participants: Emmanuel Moebel, Charles Kervrann.

Collaborator: Damien Larivière (Fourmentin-Guilbert Foundation).

A three-year contract was established with Fondation Fourmentin-Guilbert to partly support the PhD thesis of Emmanuel Moebel. The Fondation Fourmentin-Guilbert strives for building a virtual E. coli bacteria. Information about the position of macromolecules within the cell is necessary to achieve such a 3D molecularly-detailed model. The Fondation Fourmentin-Guilbert supports cutting-edge in-situ cryo-electron tomography combined with image processing at the Max-Planck Institute of Biochemistry to map the spatial distribution of the ribosomes, and obtain structural information on the complexes they form in-situ with cofactors and other ribosomes. The objective of the project is to explore novel methods from the field of 3D shape retrieval for identifying and counting macromolecules within a tomogram. This project is also supported by Région Bretagne.