Laureates of the prematuration grants 2024

Discover the funded projects

• Marie-Emilie Terret (Collège de France) - MOQA: Microfluidics for oocyte quality assessment | Meiosis produces gametes. The ability of the embryo, generated by the fusion of the gametes, to develop into a healthy offspring is closely related to the quality of the oocyte. Female meiosis is error-prone, generating a high basal rate of poor-quality oocytes, with deleterious consequences for fertility and offspring development. Human and mouse oocytes quality correlate with their mechanical properties. However, mechanical defects are rather frequent in these oocytes. The project aims to use mechanical properties as a biomarker of oocyte quality and develop a diagnostic tool for the selection of the best oocytes for assisted reproductive technologies. As a proof of concept, the team has developed a constriction-based microfluidic device able to discriminate mouse oocytes with very different mechanical properties. They now want to scale our device to human oocytes for clinical application.
• Andrew Griffiths (ESPCI) - DNA circuits for high-throughput discovery of T cell receptors and T cell antigens | Identifying T cell receptors(TCRs) on cytotoxic (CD8+)T cells and the antigenic peptidesbound to major histocompatibility complex class I (pMHC-I) that they recognize is critical for understanding immune responsesin disease and for the development of immuno-therapies.CD8+ T cells can be stainedwith fluorescent pMHC-I tetramers and recovered by fluorescence-activated cell sorting (FACS). However, while low affinity antigen-TCR interactions elicit significant immune responses, FACSis challenging due to loss of weakly bound pMHC during washing.We propose a high-throughput technologyin which pMHC-I tetramers bound to single T cells in microfluidic droplets triggers exponential amplification of a bistable molecular circuit, enabling identification of TCRs and cognate antigens by sequencing. It eliminating the need for washing and bypasses FACS, allowing the detection of even low affinity pMHC-TCR interactions and use of barcoded pMHC tetramers allowssimultaneous screening of multiple antigenic-peptides.