Sarah Merkling

go.bsky.app/36RdG8Z

4 research institute march together hand in hand for diversity and inclusion in science © Franck Aubry

© Franck Aubry

© Franck Aubry

🌈 United for diversity in science 🌈
Researchers from Institut Pasteur joined the 2025 Pride March alongside @institutcurie.bsky.social, Les Cordeliers Research Center, @institutcochin.bsky.social @institutimagine.bsky.social

👩‍🔬 Because diverse labs make better science.
#DiversityInScience

🎉 Our study is now published in Cell Genomics ! Thank to our reviewers for helping us further improve our work, and congratulations to @tompvial.bsky.social who lead this project and the entire team that made it possible ! www.cell.com/cell-genomic...

Awesome post-doc position available within the @maringerlab.bsky.social ! I can highly recommend applying to @pirbrightinst.bsky.social - Kevin and Trevor are wonderful PI's to be working with !

Changes to the 2026 and 2027 Work Programmes With the launch of the competitions for grants under ERC Work Programme 2026 in July of this year, several changes to the submission of applications and the evaluation of proposals will apply. The mai...

Planning to apply for #research #funding from the ERC?

From the next application rounds, expect changes to the:

• proposal structure
• evaluation process
• extra funding you can request
• eligibility for Starting & Consolidator #Grants (from 2027)

More 👇 europa.eu/!RPHWvv

Had the pleasure of listening to @ardemp.bskyverified.social’s lecture yesterday at @pasteur.fr - and seeing a live demonstration of the Piezo tattoo !

Wrapped up a 4 seminar Tour de 🇫🇷 with stops in Lyon, Strasbourg, and Paris (IBPS, Pasteur). Had a blast with fellow scientists across the pond, lots of convo about the current US landscape. You might recognize Jean-Marie Lehn, Jean-Pierre Changeux, and Christine Petit. Also: white asparagus season!

A graphic for the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA), showing a historical portrait of Marie Skłodowska-Curie overlaid with an image of four young researchers walking down a hallway. The European Commission logo is in the top left. Text reads: "Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions – €404.3 million to support postdoctoral researchers”

Choose Science. Choose Europe.

A new Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions Postdoctoral Fellowships 2025 call is now open.

With a budget of €404.3 million, it will support around 1,650 researchers from Europe and beyond.

Apply by 10 September → europa.eu/!fBTMgF

Had a wonderful time at the #EMBLChromatin meeting in Heidelberg last week with @sumeyye-ozhan.bsky.social who was sponsored by a @pasteur.fr - @events.embl.org travel award ! @sebbaumgarten.bsky.social ;)

Congratulations on getting the poster prize !! 🥳
Also very nice meeting you at the conference :)

YouTube video by Pasteur Lille Maladie de Lyme : comment s’en protéger ? - Sébastien Bontemps Gallo - 10' de prév'

@sebbontempsgallo.bsky.social , Chercheur @cnrs-hautsdefrance.bsky.social @cnrsbiologie.bsky.social

Maladie de #Lyme : comment s’en protéger ?

Our paper is now published in its final form: rdcu.be/elV6u @biomedcentral.bsky.social @salehlabparis.bsky.social @merklinglab.bsky.social @pasteur.fr

That's amazing - congratulations to you all!

This is super cool - very much looking forward to reading the pre-print and the book. Congratulations to all of you for an another amazing study, it makes me miss the Drosophila field even more ;)

Our department (Dev & Stem Cells) @igbmc.bsky.social has an open call for group leaders (all areas of cell biology considered!). Check out website for synergies! Please help spread the word (incl to postdocs in the US!! Strasbourg isn't a bad place to live 😜) @cnrsbiologie.bsky.social @inserm.fr

University of Minnesota Genomics Center Model Organism Sequencing Service Flyer. $25 for a 30x Drosophila genome.

Hey fellow Drosophila researchers - if you haven't heard, the UMGC is offering ultra low-cost genome sequencing! See here to learn more: z.umn.edu/UMGC-MOSS #Dros25

Interested in doing a sabbatical at EMBL, at one of its 6 sites in Barcelona, Cambridge, Grenoble, Hamburg, Heidelberg or Rome?

Funding call with deadline 15 June, decisions in July.

www.embl.org/about/info/s...

Absolutely stunning work by @steinaerts.bsky.social and @frankschoonbeek.bsky.social 🤩

There have been people less than helpful in my journey here. I wanted to acknowledge those too, bc I know I am not unique in this experience. No thank you to the physics study assoc that made me sing songs about how women couldn't study physics without sleeping with the professor, the day I stepped into university life. No thank you to the 5th year physics student that decided to assign me a stripper name within the first minute of meeting me in the physics coffee corner in my first year. No thank you to the technician that was responsible for onboarding me on the use of the cluster in my third year who raised his eyebrows and asked me if that meant I was some sort of computer girl. No thank you to the senior researcher that sent me utterly inappropriate texts after a conference, then proceeded to apologise months later by telling me they had not been meant for me anyway so no hard feelings remain hopefully And no thank you to him for attending every conference I've been to since. No thank you to the people who told me that it was surprising that I was doing a PhD since I was a girl. No thank you to the man who mistook me for a coffee lady at a conference, and after having to correct him two times that I did not work there, responded with you should consider it. No thank you to the researcher that asked me what I was wearing underneath my outfit during a conference. No thank you to the physicist who declared to a room full of other physicists that biologists don't know how to design an experiment. No thank you to the people who have called me scary instead of strong and intimidating instead of intelligent. And finally, no thank you to the exec board of the TU Delft, whose knee-jerk reaction to being held up a mirror about the social safety at the university, was to sue the party holding up the mirror instead of looking at the problems they highlighted. ... You have made me feel like I do not belong in science & I cannot forgive you for that.

A friend included this anti-acknowledgement section on her PhD thesis. She also added the proposition: “Systematic bullying and undermining of girls and women in STEM starts early on and is the reason why they do not stay in science and related fields.”
Absurd we still need to go through this
🧪👩‍🔬

Thank you! I would be curious to know more about that indeed.

I would also like to thank our institutions and funders, @pasteur.fr @cnrsecologie.bsky.social @agencerecherche.bsky.social @ird-fr.bsky.social @sorbonne-universite.fr @upcite.bsky.social @unistra.fr @frm-officiel.bsky.social for making all of this possible.

But foremost, I would like to thank Louis @lambrechtslab.bsky.social for bringing me on to such a scientific adventure, riding out all the project's ups and downs through a world pandemic, and helping with pushing this over the finish line together with @elodiecouderc.bsky.social.

Of course, so many questions remain. But for now, I thank everyone that poured time and energy into this project. Many members of @lambrechtslab.bsky.social, Anna and @elodiecouderc.bsky.social - our Bioinformatics Core, and most of all Davy, Christophe and Diego who first found those wonderful 🦟.

Finally, Anna bravely generated Bakoumba mosquito sub-populations. One that contains the 18-bp deletion, and one that doesn't. We then infected these lines with DENV-1 and DENV-3 and confirmed that this deletion was sufficient to alter mosquito susceptibility to virus infection.

We sequenced hundreds of mosquitoes and found a recurring 18-bp deletion in the CYP4g15 promotor region of some mosquitoes. This deletion correlated with CYP4g15 expression levels. A jaw-dropping result obtained by Elodie and Anna.

During the entire project, we kept noticing that CYP4g15 expression levels were very variable between mosquitoes and asked whether those differences could be linked to mutations in the gene's sequence. A wild guess, really.

Next, Anna and Eric created mosquito lines that ubiquitously overexpressed CYP4g15 and confirmed the gene's role upon DENV infection. When it is present at high levels, it prevents mosquitoes from being infected ! This was an amazing result. And, it also works for DENV-3.

I knocked-down 40 individual genes using RNAi and assessed whether they altered DENV infection levels. About a year and gazillions mosquitoes later, I found that CYP4g15 had a strong and consistent impact on DENV. Upon gene knock-down, infection rates were significantly increased.

The project started when we found that mosquitoes from Bakoumba, Gabon were able to resist DENV-1 infection. The resistance occured within midguts, and using single-midgut RNA-seq, we got a list of candidate genes that could underlie this phenotype.

Dengue virus susceptibility in Aedes aegypti linked to natural cytochrome P450 variants The mosquito Aedes aegypti is the primary vector for dengue virus (DENV), which infects millions of people annually. Variability in DENV susceptibility among wild Ae. aegypti populations is governed b...

Happy to share our work exploring the genetic basis of dengue susceptibility in Aedes aegypti and revealing the antiviral role of a cytochrome P450. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
It had been a long and wild ride that started back when I was a postdoc within @lambrechtslab.bsky.social ! A thread ⬇️