ELiS in brief

The Engaged Life Science (ELiS) Collaboratory

ELiS, headed by team leaders Aude Bernheim, Vincent Libis and Ariel Lindner (unit director), engages in interdisciplinary research aimed at harnessing fundamental understanding of living systems to face global sustainable development challenges.

We combine expertise in computational biology, systems and synthetic biology and promote open, inclusive, frugal science. Our work is carried out at the INSERM U1284 of INSERM (the French national biomedical institute) and the Université Paris Cité, hosted in and supported by the Learning Planet Institute.

ELiS combines the expertise of >20 young researchers from >10 nationalities in-house as well as affiliated faculty and alumni across the globe.

Research highlights: Discovery and understanding of bacterial immune systems — Natural product discovery from soil bacteria — TerraBacta: global atlas of soil biosynthetic gene clusters — Engineering bacteria for sustainable bio-production via synthetic organelles – Frugal solutions for low cost detection of infectious agents– Open Medical solutions (e.g., dialysis machine, breast cancer screening)

ELiS Teams

Molecular Diversity of Microbes

Our research revolves around bacteria and their viruses, phages.Facing the abundance and diversity of their viruses, bacteria and archaea have developed multiple lines of defense that can be referred to as « prokaryotic immune systems« . Our research focuses on these anti-phage immune systems. We are trying to understand evolutionary patterns and molecular mechanisms of these systems but also how to use them for medical applications. We work at several scales: from computational genomic analysis on thousands of prokaryotic genomes to experimental molecular genetics and diverse microbiology tools.

Cryptic Microbial Metabolites

We are interested in discovering novel bioactive microbial metabolites. Microbial metabolites play important roles in medicine and they are a key source of antibiotics, anticancer agents or immunosuppressants. We develop sequencing, bioinformatics and synthetic biology methods to rapidly detect and characterize novel genes responsible for the biosynthesis of cryptic microbial metabolites. We also work on involving the general public in helping to source new medicines through citizen science projects.

SEED - Systems Engineering and Evolution Dynamics

The Lindner team’s main efforts rely on years of investment in building an intellectual and experimental framework based on interdisciplinary approaches, harnessing physics and computer science and on welcoming young researchers to address key questions in Life Sciences with Systems and Synthetic Biology approaches, mainly focusing on Escherichia coli as the simplest (yet still not fully understood) model organism. Focal projects include study of phenotypic variability, ageing, evolution of cooperation, probing RNA structure in vivo and RNA scaffolding.We also develop open and citizen science projects extended from antimicrobial drug discovery and democratizing DNA detection to supporting Open Collaborative Efforts for Autism spectrum Network (OCEAN).The team is at the core of building the CRI Collaboratory research effort and contributes to developing the CRI undergraduate and graduate programs as well as outreach learning through research programs across the globe. For the past 13 years, the team mentored the Paris Bettencourt iGEM team.