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Student in Master 2 from Université Paris-Saclay, I am doing a 6-month internship in the PhylHom team of the Micalis Institute of INRA in Jouy-en-Josas under the direction of Marion Leclerc. This internship is part of the MetaScreen project, of the INRA MEM metaprogramme, which aims to discover new enzymes from natural microbial ecosystems such as those of the soil, the rumen, the human intestine or the digestive tract of xylophagous insects.

My task at PhylHom consists in analyzing functions of the human intestinal microbiota by metagenomic approaches: I participate in the analysis of 12 metagenomic clones from the human microbiota which show an adhesion phenotype to the intestinal mucus, by:

- Mutagenesis by random transposition of fosmid clones, screening and identification of genes involved in adhesion to mucins

- Sequence analysis, taxonomic characterization of microbiota species coding for these genes

- Cultivation of strains taxonomically close to the clones to determine if the strains express these functions highlighted in E. coli

Having obtained funding from Université Paris-Saclay, I am continuing this work for a month in the laboratory of Pr Mark Morrison, collaborator of the PhylHom team, at the Diamantina Research Institute (Brisbane, Australia).

My interest in the intestinal microbiota comes from a bibliographic project carried out under bachelor, on the article "Richness of human gut microbiome correlates with metabolic markers" by Le Chatelier and al. (2013) about the link between intestinal microbiota and obesity. Since then I have been looking to deepen my knowledge in this field and doing this internship in the PhylHom team is a great opportunity. I would like to thank the whole team for their welcome and their sympathy.