Course - Quantitative Approaches to DNA Damage and Repair

This one week workshop is part of a series of Winter Schools organized by PSL and its Qlife program in Quantitative Biology and taught at the Ecole Normale Supérieure (ENS)

Description

Recent technological developments in sequencing, imaging and image analysis have granted unprecedented access to the complex, dynamic, and sometimes even overlapping processes and pathways that nearly all organisms use to repair their DNA, thereby guaranteeing the integrity of their genome.

The Qlife program in Quantitative Biology of the PSL University organizes a 5-day winter school that will cover these emerging approaches through a series of lectures and digital workshops, using datasets from model organisms, both prokaryotic and eukaryotic. Evenings will feature keynote speaker seminars and poster presentations by the students. 

The aim of this Winter School is to provide the attendees with a basic set of skills in different areas, including the quantitative analysis of different DNA repair pathways, understand the higher level physical organization of genomes and look at cell expression. 

The dynamics of DNA repair processes will be explored using imaging approaches ranging from real-time single-molecule tracking of repair complexes to cellular-scale analysis. Quantitative analysis of the outcome of DNA repair pathways will be studied by overlaying sequence information with multiscale modelling of chromatin marks and contemporary understanding of the higher level physical organization of genomes into topologically-associated domains. These data will be integrated with the output of single-cell and spatial transcriptomic analyses to provide an unprecedented combined view of cell location, morphology, interactions, migration, expression pattern and fate.

The workshop will provide

• Machine learning for DSB formation and repair
• Following replication errors and mutations in real time at the single-cell level
• Understanding chromosome organization using polymer physics and HI-C Data
• BLISS data processing
• Turning microscopy images into robust and reliable quantitative analysis

Keywords

Quantitative analysis, DNA repair, DSB, quantitative biology, HI-C Data, Chromatin, BLISS data, single-cell, photochemistry, transcriptomic... 

_Application (deadline January 19th, 2026)_

The winter school is limited to 25 participants (attendance is competitive). It is open to M2 and PhD students, as well as postdocs, engineers and junior scientists with backgrounds in chemistry, life science, physics, computer science and mathematics. Knowledge or experience in the fields of the school is recommended.

Basic experience in file manipulation under Unix/Linux and coding ability in Python or R.

Registration fees: 150 € for academic participants (Fees covers lunches from Monday to Friday and some dinners).

Application procedure :

1) Register through the following link: https://forms.cloud.microsoft/e/h7Au5vMBmP 
2) In addition, provide a CV, a motivation letter and a supporting letter from a supervisor as a single pdf file with “Qlife DNA repair WS2026_LASTNAME” as subject header to qlife.events@psl.eu