Trouillon Group

Research Focus

The research in our group aims at getting a mechanistic understanding of how bacteria use transcriptional regulation to adapt to environmental changes. We work at the scales of molecular interactions and networks, focusing on transcription factors - the DNA-binding proteins that regulate gene expression.

Research topics:

1. Regulatory networks in bacterial pathogens. Here, we focus on bacterial pathogens to understand how transcriptional regulatory networks evolve to integrate new genetic material, and how they enable the physiological adaptation needed for infections.

2. Molecular rules of transcription factor interactions. Here, we aim to define transferable molecular rules that dictate transcription factor regulatory interactions to enable the prediction and manipulation of gene expression responses.

To address these questions, we use and develop high-throughput sequencing-based approaches to characterize transcriptional regulatory networks. These include an automated pipeline for in vitro characterization of transcription factor interactions at the scale of entire regulatory networks. We focus on two molecular aspects of transcription factor biology: (i) The interactions of transcription factors with DNA to regulate gene expression, and (ii) the molecular signals sensed by transcription factors to modulate their DNA-binding activity.

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