Anne Dejean selected for funding by the European Research Council

Anne Dejean, Director of the Nuclear Organization and Oncogenesis Unit at the Institut Pasteur and Inserm, has been awarded a European Research Council (ERC) Advanced Grant for her project SUMiDENTITY: Deconstructing the role of SUMO on chromatin in cell identity and tissue repair, to be administered by Inserm.

The proposed research concerns the role on chromatin of an enigmatic post-translational modification by the Ubiquitin-like SUMO proteins ("SUMOylation") in mechanisms that stabilize and help determine cell identity. Previous work by the Dejean laboratory has shown that sumoylation acts as a barrier to cell fate transitions such as differentiation, trans-differentiation and reprogramming to stemness. Future work is thus devoted to uncovering the ways by which SUMO modification, acting as an epigenetic mark, affects the gene regulatory pathways that determine cell fate. Since the SUMO modification pathway is 'druggable', this work also has important implications for therapeutic applications in the treatment of cancer and in tissue repair.

The average success rate for the 2018 ERC Advanced Grant call is 10.8% (11% in the area of life sciences). The ranking by country for all scientific disciplines is topped by the United Kingdom, followed by Germany, France, the Netherlands , Switzerland, Sweden, Italy, Belgium, Spain, Israel , etc. The ranking is essentially the same in the field of life sciences.