margaret.buckingham@pasteur.fr
Honorary professor of the Institut Pasteur
President of the Ethics Committee of the Institut Pasteur
PRESENTATION
Margaret Buckingham is now an honorary professor at the Pasteur Institute, where she chairs the Ethics committee. She joined the Institute as a postdoc in François Gros’ laboratory when he became head of the Biochemistry Unit in the Department of Molecular Biology, in 1972. Her research focused on changes in messenger RNA populations during the differentiation of skeletal muscle cells. Subsequently in her own lab in the same department, she developed gene specific probes to examine gene expression in the mouse embryo as skeletal muscle forms. Her lab also isolated the corresponding actin and myosin genes, determining their structure and regulation. This analysis was subsequently extended to studying the function of genes for myogenic regulatory factors, notably for the myogenic determination factor Myf5 and for Pax3 the upstream regulator of the genetic hierarchy that leads multipotent cells to adopt a muscle cell fate. With Didier Montarras she studied muscle regeneration by satellite cells in the adult, where these regulatory factors also play a role. In her lab, the fortuitous expression of a myosin transgene led to the identification of a new source of progenitor cells for the mammalian heart, also demonstrated by retrospective lineage analysis. This second heart field has proved to be of major importance during cardiogenesis. Prior to the Department of Developmental and Stem Cell Biology, she was a previous director of the Molecular Biology and then Developmental Biology departments, located in the Monod building.
LOCALISATION
MONOD BUILDING n° 66, n° 28 rue du Docteur Roux 75015 Paris. Ground floor, left side, office n° 05A
Contact: maryse.brandt@pasteur.fr tel: +33 1 40 61 39 91 (assistant). Ground floor, left side, office n° 07
