PhD position – Nucleic Acid-based biosensors

Design of aptasensors for monitoring metabolic markers of tumors.

The project deals with the design and the characterization of aptamer-based sensors that would signal in a quantitative manner the presence of a pre-determined target. To this aim aptamers will firstly be selected against the target of interest. Secondly these aptamers will be engineered into aptaswitches whose conformational change induced by the binding of the ligand will translate into fluorescence variation.

We have recently described aptamer-based biosensors taking advantage of loop-loop (kissing) interactions (Durand G. et al., Angewandte Chemie, 2014). We will make use of this technology for tayloring aptasensors. Several strategies will be considered to this end using either i) synthetic oligonucleotides that will be delivered into cancer cells or ii) an in situ gene reporter based system whose expression is controlled via a riboswitch. The project will require the use of SELEX, standard methods in molecular biology and molecular biophysics (cloning, sequencing, SPR, fluorescence spectroscopy, …) for producing and characterizing the sensor-ligand complexes.

This project will be carried out in the frame of MetaRNA, a European ITN project, in the ARNA Laboratory, Inserm U869, University of Bordeaux, France. Contact : jean-jacques.toulme@inserm.fr.