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Sébastien Carréno collaborates with a team from France on a study published in EMBO J
Published on July 25, 2024
Sébastien Carréno, Director of IRIC’s Cellular Mechanisms of Morphogenesis during Mitosis and Cell Motility Research Unit, has signed a new publication in EMBO J with colleagues from the Institute of Pharmacology and Structural Biology of Toulouse. The project was led by PhD student Perrine Verdys, co-supervised by Professor Carréno. The group’s work demonstrates that macrophages, which are immune cells, can migrate without the ERM proteins, cell cortex proteins until now considered essential to any cell migration process.
No ERM? No problem!
The team of scientists generated mutant macrophages, in which ERMs were absent. To their great surprise, these modified macrophages showed no defects in the cell cortex and no difficulty in migrating.
“It is extremely surprising to find that ERM proteins are not required for macrophage migration,” mentions Sébastien Carréno. “Our results challenge the idea that ERMs are universal organizers of the cell cortex. I salute Perrine Verdys, a PhD student co-supervised with my Toulouse colleagues and lead author of this article. She brilliantly overcame what appeared to be negative results and paved the way for understanding what makes macrophages unique and essential cells that are present in all tissues.”
