NARILIS lunch seminar | Dr. Audrey Laurent Granger, Institut Necker Enfants Malades (INEM), Paris

We are pleased to invite you to a seminar given by

Dr. Audrey Laurent Granger

Institut Necker Enfants Malades (INEM), Paris

Audrey Laurent Granger completed her PhD thesis within the "Host-Pathogen Integrative Biology" team led by Mathieu Coureuil and Anne Jamet, which she finished in September 2025. Her thesis work lay at the interface between meningococcal microbiology and endothelial cell biology and explored the role of tetraspanins and endothelial membrane deformation during meningococcal adhesion. 

Her seminar is entitled :

Endothelial plasma membrane deformation and receptors recruitment upon Neisseria meningitidis adhesion

Once passed into the bloodstream, bacterial pathogens have a limited time to interact with permissive receptors at the surface of host cells. Neisseria meningitidis has developed an extremely effective strategy allowing it to find its receptors in a few seconds.

Neisseria meningitidis relies on type IV pili to interact with host plasma membrane and promote the formation of early tubular membrane structures essential for initial bacterial adhesion. While membrane deformation has been linked to type IV pili retraction forces and to host cell signalling events such as ezrin recruitment and actin polymerization, we demonstrated that these tubular structures not only form before the initiation of any signalling events in host cells, but also concentrate and trap multiple plasma membrane-associated proteins in the vicinity of bacteria.

Using the tetraspanin protein CD9 to highlight plasma membrane dynamics upon meningococcal adhesion, we were able to define an additional paradigm for the recruitment of specific receptors by pathogenic bacteria, based on the physical induction of plasma membrane remodelling by bacterial pili.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-65436-1

Invited by Prof. Henri-François Renard, UNamur, URBC