People

David Serre trained in human population genetics and received his Ph.D. from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig (Germany) in 2004. He then joined the McGill University and Genome Quebec Innovation Centre for a post-doctoral fellowship, working on the regulation of gene expression and genome-wide association studies. After nine years as a faculty at the Cleveland Clinic and Case Western Reserve University, he joined the Institute for Genome Sciences and the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at the University of Maryland – Baltimore in 2017.

Interests: Plasmodium vivax, malaria, vector biology, eukaryotic parasites, gene expression, population genetics

Davids publications

Dr. Franck Dumetz obtained his bachelor’s in biology from the Université Libres des Sciences et Technologies in Lille, France in 2010 working on Cryptosporidium parvum. He then obtained a master’s degree in molecular and cellular biology in 2012 from the Pierre and Marie Curie university in Paris, France. His master’s research was caried out under the supervision of Dr. Gerald Spaeth at the Pasteur Institute in Paris to study the interaction between MAP kinase 7 and metacaspase in Leishmania major. He then pursued a PhD focusing on this parasite and obtained his PhD from the University of Antwerp (Belgium) in 2018 after working under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Jean-Claude Dujardin at the Institute for Tropical Medicine of Antwerp. During his doctoral investigations, Dr. Dumetz generated experimental evidence of the role of gene dosage in the acquisition of antimony resistance in L. donovani.  He absolved a first postdoctoral training at in the department of pathology at Cambridge University under the supervision of Dr. Catherine Merrick where he demonstrated the involvement of guanine quadruplexes, an RNA secondary structure, in translation repression in the Plasmodium falciparum. This Plasmodium experience led him to join the Serre lab in 2021 for a second postdoc to work on RNA packaging and translation repression in P. falciparum. In 2023, Dr. Dumetz was promoted Research Associate.

My research interest is to provide knowledge on how unicellular eukaryotes (protozoan) use the variety of RNA biological mechanisms to progress in their life cycle. I am focusing on two different species of protozoan of medical interest: Plasmodium, the parasite causing malaria and Leishmania, the agent of leishmaniasis. Those two diseases are the two most prevalent human diseases caused by a parasite. 

Francks publications

Janne Grünebast obtained her Bachelor of Science in Biology from the University of Halle-Wittenberg (Germany). After a gap year travelling the world, she completed her Master’s degree at the same university in 2018, specialising in genetics, epigenetics and molecular biology. She then pursued her PhD at the Bernhard Nocht Institute for Tropical Medicine (BNITM) in Hamburg, Germany, under the supervision of Dr. Joachim Clos. She worked on the influence of chromatin density on transcription initiation in Leishmania donovani and established new sequencing methods in Leishmania spp.. She received her PhD from the University of Hamburg in 2022 and continued her work at the BNITM as a postdoc for another year. In May 2023, she joined the Serre lab as a postdoc.

I am interested in the control of gene expression in Plasmodium falciparum. In particular, the regulation of transcription and translation in quiescent stages and the importance of long non coding RNAs in these processes. I apply different sequencing methods, such as bulk RNA-seq, single cell RNA sequencing and Oxford nanopore sequencing.

Jannes publications