University of Gothenburg
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Marc Pilon

Professor

Department of Chemistry & Molecular Biology
Mail
marc.pilon@cmb.gu.se
Visiting address
Medicinaregatan 7 B
41390 Göteborg
Room number
7263
Postal address
Box 462
40530 Göteborg

About Marc Pilon

RESEARCH AREA

Leveraging Forward Genetics to Elucidate Membrane and Lipid Homeostasis. Since 2001, my lab has used forward genetics to isolate novel interesting mutants in C. elegans, with a particular focus on identifying the genes responsible for lipid homeostasis. Using this approach, we identified well over 50 novel alleles in over 20 genes and were able to define molecular pathways that protect cell membrane composition against environmental or dietary insults, or that compensate for a reduced ability to produce polyunsaturated fatty acids, or that regulate the trafficking of cellular material essential to maintain the structural boundaries that surround cells. Basically, our go-to approach is this: 1) Think of a cool new screen; 2) Randomly mutagenize worms with a mutagen (EMS) and screen preferably until >10 novel mutants are found; 3) Outcross the mutants 6 times to “clean up their genome”; 4) Do whole genome sequencing (WGS) to identify candidate mutations that caused the phenotype of interest; 5) Experimentally confirm the causative mutant alleles using CRISPR/Cas9 to re-create them; 6) Characterize the novel alleles and try to elucidate the pathway involved. This is a super powerful and unbiased experimental approach: we let the worms tell us what genes are responsible for the biological phenomenon we are interested in! 

Link: Pilon LAB

TEACHING

BIO555 Genetics

BIO906 Cell and molecular biology

BIO426 Evolutionary ecology

BIO514 Molecular evolution

KMG045 Drug development (Chalmers)

KMG042 Molecular methods (Chalmers)

UPPDRAG

Responsible for PhD education at Dept Chem Mol Biol.

Google Scholar: Marc Pilon