Course info

Biotechnology for Health and Agriculture (S. Thomine et A. Meunier)

I) Biotechnology & Medicine: Towards Regenerative Therapies (A. Meunier)
How to repair tissue damaged by age or disease? In addition to chemotherapy, organ transplants and prostheses have attempted to respond to this challenge by replacing the damaged organ or tissue. When possible and tolerated by the body, these very heavy interventions require lifelong treatments. Advances in cellular and molecular biology have led to the emergence of new therapies, using evolutionarily selected biological processes to repair deficient tissues. This part of medicine, called "regenerative medicine", targets a definitive cure of the patient and is the subject of a very active research. A large part of the course will be devoted to stem cell biology, a field in full expansion and whose influence and applications are growing. We will see that some human cells have kept a stem cell potential. In addition, we are now able to reprogram differentiated adult cells into pluripotent stem cells (iPS). We will also show how the use of parasites specialized in the diversion of cellular machinery, combined to the use of bacterial enzymatic systems such as the CRISPR / Cas9 system allow the modification of gene expression in targeted cell types. Finally, we will discuss the ethical issues as well as the limits to be imposed on the modification and the commercialization of living.

 

II) Biotechnology & agriculture (S. Thomine)
With increasing world population and limited resources availability (e.g. arable land, fossil carbon, and water), food security remains a major challenge. This challenge is amplified by an increasing use of plant biomass for green chemistry and energy production. At the same time, climate change and the importance of preserving the environment and biodiversity cause additional constraints on production systems. In this context, it seems necessary to develop a "sustainable intensification" of agriculture.
In this course, we will see how plant biology and biotechnology can contribute to tackle these challenges, and their potential risks or limitations. In the first part we will discuss the genetic, molecular and cellular bases of plant development and reproduction and their domestication. In a second part, we will present recent developments in genomics and biotechnologies (cloning, transgenesis and genome editing) and will see how they can contribute to plan breeding to meet the different agronomic, industrial, environmental or social challenges.

 

Required level: At least one biology module in year 2.
Course language: English