Participants
18 November 2023
15:40 – 16:25
Amphitheatre Painlevé
Antoine Triller
Antoine Triller holds a doctorate in medicine and a doctorate in science, and is Director of Research Emeritus at Inserm, where he heads the “Biology of the Synapse” team. He was Director of the Biology Department at the Ecole Normale Supérieure from 2006 to 2014, and in 2010 founded the Institut de Biologie de l’École normale supérieure (IBENS), which he will direct until 2018. In 2007, together with Daniel Louvard and Jacques Prost, Members of the French Academy of Sciences, he founded the Pierre-Gilles de Gennes Foundation for transdisciplinary research. From 2010 to 2019, he was co-founder with Alain Prochiantz and coordinator of the “MemoLife” labex promoting collaborations between scientists working at different levels of life biology, bringing together laboratories from the ENS, Collège de France and École Supérieure de Physique et Chimie Industrielles (ESPCI). Antoine Triller’s research focuses on the biology of the synapse. His initial research was carried out at the Institut Pasteur under the direction of Henri Korn. In 1995, he joined the Ecole Normale Supérieure and developed his research into the dynamics of neuronal receptors. Using original molecular imaging techniques developed with physicists, he showed that synaptic receptors are not fixed, but constantly diffuse in the plane of the membrane. He demonstrates that this phenomenon, necessary for learning, is regulated by the activity of neurons and neural networks. The molecular mechanisms responsible for this regulation were identified. These results led to a radical rethinking of neuronal membrane biology. A new paradigm for the synapse emerged, abandoning the notion of a stable structure in favor of a highly dynamic metastable complex, with membrane components diffusing continuously across the plane of the membrane. This innovative vision is the result of ingenious applications of super-resolving molecular visualization microscopy, combined with cutting-edge computer modeling and analysis. These new mechanisms shed new and unexpected light, at the synapse level, on pathophysiological mechanisms concerning disorders of neuronal excitability (epilepsy, neuropathic pain) or responsible for the development of the neurodegenerative diseases Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.