CV Science

louis Gastinel Professor

Course and current status

I am initially trained as a Molecular Biologist with Immunology specificity in INSERM U25 Paris Necker Hospital. My Doctoral Thesis is in Cellular Immunology on "the characterisation T cell receptor for Factor Thymique Serique FTS immunomodulator".  I have completed my training in the field of Molecular Biology during 2 postdoctoral years in C. Auffray's laboratory (Nogent-sur-Marnes) working on gp120/CD4 protein interactions and on the identification of chicken cytokine ortholog genes.  I spent 3 postdoctoral years in CalTech, CA, USA in Pamela Bjorkman's protein crystallography laboratory working on the structural caracterisation of a neonatal Fc receptor FcRn  with large similarity to MHC Class I and on insect hemolin, an immune Ig-like protein.  I spent 2 years in a San Diego CA, USA,  Drug Design Company (Agouron Pharmaceutical Inc.) working in a team-project to solve human calcineurin 3D structure.  Coming back to France as a researcher in Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), I developed protein engineering methods in order to successfully describe in the laboratory of C. Cambillau (AFMB, Marseille)  the first crystallographic structures of mammalian galactosyltransferases Galb1,4T implicated in lactose synthesis and Gala1,3T implicated in blood group synthesis.  

I am now Professor of Structutral Biology and Bioinformatics in the University of Limoges  

Scientific summary

Since 2002, I have a full time Professor position in the University of Limoges in the department Science de la Vie et de la Terre (SVT).  I teach Structural Biology and Bioinformatics as well as algorithmic  (language : Perl, python, java, objective C) to undergraduate and graduate students in biology.  I am interested in using and developing elearning methods particularly using mobile devices (iPhone, iPad)  to motivate and follow the progress of my students with up-to-date communication technologies.

I am a member of the INSERM UMR U850 laboratory (dir: Prof Pierre Marquet). The laboratory "Pharmacology of Immunosuppressants in transplantation" is involved to discover new biomarkers helping to diagnose, predict and follow the dysfunction of graft, essentially kidney graft.  Moreover, using pharmacogenetics and clinical prediction modelisation methods, the laboratoy is implicated to get insight in  the molecular basis of personalized treatment, particularly of immunosuppressants of calcineurin inhibitor class (CNIs).  I am involved in using Mass Spectrometry (MS) technologies as well as "omics"  high-throughput methods applicated to proteomics and metabolomics in the field of biomarker discovery and validation.  I am also implicated in the discovery of new MS-based technologies to propose high sensitive and specific alternatives to  ELISA to quantify in biofluids new therapeutic biomolecules (fusion proteins, therapeutic monoclonal antibodies) in a clinical application context.