Katarzyna Siudeja

Institut Curie

WHO AM I

After obtaining my Master’s degree in biotechnology from the University of Wrocław, Poland, I started my scientific “voyage” through Europe. A short-term fellowship in Greece, followed by a PhD in the Netherlands, introduced me to the use of the fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster, as a model system to ask fundamental questions in biology. For my postdoctoral training, I moved to the Institut Curie in Paris, France, to study how and why cells acquire DNA mutations, and how these mutations can impact cell function. This year, I obtained a European Commission-funded ERC Starting Grant to establish my own research team in the Institute for Integrative Biology of the Cell at the University of Paris-Saclay.

WHAT WILL I TALK ABOUT

During my presentation, I will talk about how my research led me to stumble upon the fascinating world of the “dark genome”. Only a small percent of our DNA constitutes what we commonly know as genes. On the other hand, the genetic information carried by each cell is filled with repetitive DNA sequences, some of which have the capacity to multiply themselves as genomic parasites. My work has recently uncovered prevalent activity of such sequences, called transposable elements, in the fruit fly intestinal tissue. Now, I aim to better understand how transposable elements influence tissue function, including their impact on stem cells, which are required for tissue regeneration, and tissue aging.