the essential
Wendy Le Mouëllic, doctoral student in the Toulouse IPBS laboratory, has just won the national competition “My Thesis in 180 seconds”. She will represent France in November for the international final of this event. To explain her work, she chose to play a dietician for bacteria.
To access Wendy Le Mouëllic’s office, in the Toulouse IPBS laboratory, you now have to pass under three large colored balloons. They use the number 180 like the “My Thesis in 180 seconds” (MT180) competition which the young doctoral student has just won. And the members of her team, who traveled by minivan to Nice to support her during the national final on June 5, intend to keep them hanging until November 21. That day, Wendy Le Mouëllic will defend her chances in Abidjan (Ivory Coast) for the international final of this French-speaking competition.
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“Dietician for bacteria”, a Toulouse woman wins the My thesis in 180 seconds competition
Understanding the tuberculosis bacteria
A graduate in biology from the École Normale Supérieure (ENS) Paris-Saclay, Wendy Le Mouëllic arrived in Toulouse in 2020 to follow her Master 2 internship at IPBS, a specialized and recognized laboratory in cancer research, infections and inflammatory diseases. “I was very interested in host-pathogen interactions, I wanted to follow my friend to Toulouse and I was recommended this laboratory” summarizes this cell biology specialist who has been working on tuberculosis for four years in Olivier’s team. Neyrolles. On December 20, she will defend her thesis, “Characterization of the pathways of sulfur acquisition and cysteine biosynthesis of Mycobacterium tuberculosis during infection”.
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Behind this statement, the biologist seeks to understand how the tuberculosis bacillus acquires sulfur, an essential element for its growth, and how sulfur sources allow it to resist the various stresses encountered during the infection. Behind this work, the objective is to identify points of vulnerability in the bacillus. To make it understandable in three minutes in the MT180 competition, she chose to play a dietician who seeks to put the bacteria on a diet, to deprive it of its favorite dish represented by strawberry tarts. But the bacteria gives him a hard time, changing the recipe for strawberry tarts or even the cooking method.
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“My research subject is metabolism. To simplify, I am interested in what the bacteria will eat. I do not have the ambition to cure tuberculosis but to understand how it lives and survives in the host with, behind it, the idea that, if we understand how it works, we can block the mechanism”, explains Wendy Le Mouëllic who “likes to come out of her laboratory and explain what she does there When we manage to do it. understanding something complicated to someone who knows nothing about it and then asking relevant questions is great. And then, it’s our role, as researchers, to get in touch with it! public to talk about science and fight against fake news.
