Marie graduated with a master’s degree in Health Biology (Genetics, Genomics and Systems Biology) in 2019 at Nantes University. She started to be interested in computational biology during an internship about intestinal microbiota in the context of gut-brain-axis pathologies. It allowed her to move forward from human genetic pathologies to microorganisms ecology at the ocean scale.
For her PhD thesis, Marie’s work focuses on connecting omics data to marine ecosystems through metabolic modeling. Genome-scale metabolic models allow quantitative and computable genotype-phenotype relationships of target organisms. Yet, models for marine eukaryotic microbes are lagging behind the availability of sequenced genomes.
Her work, combined with top-down techniques, enables fully-automatic reconstruction of eukaryotic-algae metabolic models. More than 200 models are available this far by applying this new method to Tara Oceans environmental genomes of autotrophic eukaryotes. This paves the way for an in-depth ecosystemic exploration of plankton communities from viruses to single-cell phototrophs.