Carole Lartigue

Her scientific path has started in a context where genetic tools were lacking for the functional genomics of mollicutes while genome sequences were getting available for several species. During her PhD studies in A. Blanchard lab’s, most of her work has been dedicated to the development of replicative plasmids and transformation methods that could take advantage of all the knowledge from the genome sequence to investigate cell physiology and host-pathogen interactions. Then, she joined Dr. J. Glass’ group as a post-doctoral fellow to work on the emerging so-called synthetic biology (SB) project developed at the J. Craig Venter Institute. There, she was one of the main actors who accomplished the complete chemical synthesis of a mycoplasma genome, its assembly into yeast and its transplantation into a phylogenetically related recipient cell. This work opened the way to many developments for the study and the manipulation of mollicutes and, hopefully in the future, many other micro-organisms. Now, she's working as a principal scientist in A. Blanchard lab’s, and her team is at the front line of the major developments in synthetic biology field.