Eline Lemerle awarded the President’s Prize for Best Basic Science at the WMS 2026

Eline Lemerle, a postdoctoral research fellow in the Muscle cell organisation and therapy for dominant centronuclear myopathy team headed by Marc Bitoun et Stéphane Vassilopoulos, was awarded the President’s Prize for Best Basic Research for her research project ‘Dystrophin controls clathrin-mediated endocytosis and endolysosomal homeostasis’. Interview with Eline Lemerle.

What are your award-winning works about?

Our work identifies a previously unrecognized role for dystrophin in the regulation of membrane trafficking in skeletal muscle. Using correlative fluorescence microscopy and platinum replica electron microscopy, we showed that dystrophin forms cortical domains surrounding clathrin plaques, specialized adhesion-associated clathrin structures.
In Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD), loss of dystrophin is associated with a reduction of clathrin plaques, an accumulation of clathrin-coated pits and vesicles, and increased expression of endocytic machinery components. Functionally, DMD myotubes display markedly increased endocytic activity.
Importantly, restoring dystrophin expression normalizes endocytic uptake and reverses the abnormal clathrin phenotype, demonstrating a direct link between dystrophin deficiency and endocytic dysregulation.

What new avenues does your work open up?

Future studies will aim to determine the molecular mechanisms by which dystrophin controls clathrin organization and endocytosis. We will investigate whether excessive endocytosis directly contributes to the endolysosomal defects observed in DMD and if the modulation of this endocytosis could rescue some of the DMD phenotypes. Ultimately, these findings may establish endocytic homeostasis as a novel therapeutic target and provide new cellular biomarkers to monitor dystrophin restoration therapies.