Nadjet Gacem ex-PhD student (ED SVS 402) in the former Sylvie Dufour’s team, who performed her PhD under the supervision of Nadege Bondurand (DR2, INSERM), published a paper in Nature Communications revealing the role of A-to-I RNA editing in neural crest development

Adenosine-to-inosine (A-to-I) RNA editing, mediated by enzymes of the ADAR family, is a well-known contributor of transcriptomic and, to a lesser extent, proteomic diversity.

In this paper, Nadjet Gacem extends the landscape of ADAR1 function to the field of neural crest development.

The team indeed showed that neural crest specific conditional deletion of Adar1 in mice leads to alterations of both melanocytes and Schwann cells. Upregulation of interferon stimulated genes precedes these defects, which are associated with the triggering of a signature resembling response to injury in peripheral nerves.

To read more : (Nat Commun. 2020 Jan 10;11(1):198. doi: 10.1038/s41467-019-14090-5).