Team
M2BMI
Team Manager: Chavent Matthieu
Presentation
The team develops multiscale modeling approaches and uses structural AI tools to relate biophysical processes at the nanoscale of biological membranes and individual proteins, to their mesoscale organization into organelles and cells. The team works at the intersection between computer science, biophysics, and structural biology.
The team has three main biological questions:
1. Deciphering protein-lipid interactions at the nanoscale
2. Understanding how the biophysical properties of biological membranes are modulated by their environment (and vice-versa)
3. Understanding cell-cell interactions using mesoscale modeling
Project 1
Our team develops workflows to automatically set up, construct, and analyze realistic models of biological membranes (in AT and CG). We incorporate into our models protein structures from different sources: structures from collaborators, databases (such as the PDB), models generated by AI-based methods, etc … We focus our research on both bacterial membranes, such as outer membrane of E. coli (in collaboration with the team of Dr Raffaele Ieva, CBI) and Mycobacterium tuberculosis, and eukaryotic cell membranes, from plasma membranes (collaborations with CALIXAR Eurofins, with Pr Elena Seiradake lab, university of Oxford, or with Dr Birgit Habenstein, IECB Bordeaux) to organelles (collaboration with the team of Dr Jennifer Zanet, CBI)
Project 2
We collaborate with Pr Nicolas Destainville to develop mesocale models of the immune synapse between T-cells and cancer cells. We collaborate with the team of Dr Anna Duncan (Aarhus University, Denmark) to develop mesoscale models of synaptic vesicles.
– Schahl, A. et al. Histidine 73 methylation coordinates β-actin plasticity in response to key environmental factors. Nat. Commun. 16, 2304 (2025).
– Tiemann, J. K. et al. MDverse, shedding light on the dark matter of molecular dynamics simulations. eLife 12, RP90061 (2024).
– Cornet, J. et al. There and back again: bridging meso- and nano-scales to understand lipid vesicle patterning. Soft Matter 20, 4998–5013 (2024).
– Brown, C. M. et al. Supramolecular organization and dynamics of mannosylated phosphatidylinositol lipids in the mycobacterial plasma membrane. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. 120, e2212755120 (2023).
– Akkermans, O. et al. GPC3-Unc5 receptor complex structure and role in cell migration. Cell 185, 3931-3949.e26 (2022).
– Jackson, V. et al. The guidance and adhesion protein FLRT2 dimerizes in cis via dual small-X3-small transmembrane motifs. Structure 30, 1354-1365.e5 (2022).
