Deborah Bourc’his earned a PhD from Paris Diderot University about the link between DNA methylation and pathological conditions, in the context of the human syndrome of Immunodeficiency, Centromeric instability and Facial abnormalities (ICF) and embryos obtained from somatic cloning. As a postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Timothy Bestor at Columbia University in New York, she continued working on DNA methylation, and more precisely, on the role of this modification for silencing transposable elements and preserving fertility in mammals.
In 2009, she established her lab in the Genetics and Developmental Biology Department of the Institut Curie in Paris, to study the contribution of epigenetic information to mammalian reproduction. One primary focus of her team is to uncover the multi-layered control that transposable elements are subject to in the periconception window, including the role of m6A RNA methylation. They use a combination of direct RNA sequencing, genetic editing and biochemistry to understand the logics of m6A -dependent regulation of transposable element mRNAs, its diversity of actions depending on transposon types and cellular contexts and its relevance for mammalian development and reproduction.
