Paris Postdoc Seminar – Nathaniel Henneman

Invited by the Institut Jacques Monod, Nathaniel Henneman (team of Ganna Panasyuk at Institut Necker Enfants Malades (INEM)) will present a Paris Postdoc Seminar on the theme:

Nuclear functions of nutrient sensing signaling for metabolic adaptation

Introduction & abstract:

I am a Postdoc in the team of Ganna Panasyuk at Institut Necker Enfants Malades (INEM). I graduated from Bates College (USA) in 2016, majoring in Biology. I then spent two years working on retinal degeneration at Emory University before obtaining my master’s degree at University of Paris Descartes in 2019 and defended my PhD in December 2023.

One of the key questions I am to address in my work is how cellular metabolism, gene expression and transcription, are all coordinated. Energy stress in fasting is managed by activating autophagy and promoting the transcriptional remodeling of metabolism. Cytosolic nutrient sensors coordinate extracellular nutrient availability with intracellular metabolic processes to allow for cell survival. Class 3 PI3K is a highly conserved nutrient sensor known to regulate autophagy and endocytosis in response to varying nutrient conditions. It’s direct role in transcription, however, was only suggested in few studies in yeast and plants. However, we believe there is a nuclear pool of class 3 PI3K that directly regulates gene expression for metabolic adaptation. My work aims to address this unmet burden in the field. We find that nuclear class 3 PI3K regulates the transcriptional response to nutrient stress by controlling RNA Polymerase II, the Set1/COMPASS methyltransferase, and nuclear methionine to SAM flux. I aim to understand how these players are needed for our fasting adaptation and how these mechanisms could affect our metabolic resilience.