An expert in cell biology and molecular biology, Stéphane Vassilopoulos is co-director of the ‘Muscle cell organization and therapy of dominant centronuclear myopathy‘ team at the Institute’s Center of Research in Myology.
Seeking to understand why and how the alteration of certain muscle proteins leads to dysfunction and then disease, he and his team have developed an approach to cell imaging that is unique in the world, combining two cutting-edge microscopy technologies: a first image of a cell is taken with an optic microscope, then in a second image, the same cell, which is going to be traced, is imaged with the electron microscope. Using computers, the two images are then superimposed, with an exact correlation between the location of certain proteins and the underlying structure of the muscle. This provides additional information that would not be available if we had only looked at each component individually.
Through this innovative technique, the team was the first in the world to observe, for the first time, a crucial phenomenon in the functioning of neurons, enabling previously invisible anomalies at the heart of the muscle to be visualised*.
These recent discoveries have been published in the prestigious scientific journals Nature and Science**.
Watch Stéphane Vassilopoulos’ interviewExploring the infinitely smallExploring the infinitely small
* See also the interview with Stéphane Vassilopoulos (23 Sept 2024) A unique microscopy technology has revealed previously unknown mechanisms of endocytosis in the axon
** Wernert F, Moparthi SB, Pelletier F, Lainé J, Simons E, Moulay G, Rueda F, Jullien N, Benkhelifa-Ziyyat S, Papandréou MJ, Leterrier C, Vassilopoulos S. The actin-spectrin submembrane scaffold restricts endocytosis along proximal axons. Science. 2024 Aug 23;385(6711):eado2032. doi: 10.1126/science.ado2032. Epub 2024 Aug 23. PMID: 39172837 and Vassilopoulos S, Gibaud S, Jimenez A, Caillol G, Leterrier C. Ultrastructure of the axonal periodic scaffold reveals a braid-like organization of actin rings. Nat Commun. 2019 Dec 20;10(1):5803. doi: 10.1038/s41467-019-13835-6. PMID: 31862971
