Partner 3

Short name: IPT

Principal Investigator: Dr Alia Benkahla, Institut Pasteur, Tunis

Host Institution. The Institut Pasteur de Tunis (IPT) is a research institution founded in 1893. Presently, IPT is the most renowned research institution in Tunisia in biological sciences. IPT is under supervision of the Ministry of Health; it is also part of the Université El Manar of Tunis (Ministry of high Education). The missions of the institute are: Public Health Laboratory activities (PHL), Research on infectious diseases, and R/D on vaccines. About 350 persons are working at the institute with 67 scientists among whom 34 are devoted to research. About 100 students are currently preparing Master and PhD degrees at IPT. Research programs are mainly oriented towards local health problems as leishmaniasis, viral hepatitis, and scorpion venoms.

Department. The LIVGM at IPT (Tunisia) is a recognized research laboratory working in the field of leishmaniasis and immunity to infectious pathogens. Its expertise in the cellular events triggered by mediators of the immune response and in the identification of novel drug targets will be helpful in the development of novel anti-parasitic strategies. LIVGM is a WHO collaborating center for leishmaniasis as well as an International Associated Laboratory to CNRS (France). The multidisciplinary group of LIVGM at the IPT thus has developed an extensive expertise on human and experimental leishmaniasis taking advantage of the endemicity of the disease in the country. The group has identified several Leishmania genes coding for virulence factors of the parasite that may affect macrophage function (Ben Achour et al., 2002; Chenik et al., 2006).

Dr Benkahla is a bioinformaticist she did her PhD studies at the IGS-CNRS in Marseille with Jean-Michel Claverie as PhD supervisor, did her Post-Doc at the Max-Planck Institute in Berlin, and moved to LIVGM at IPT 30 months ago. She invested her initial period at IPT in capacity building in the field of Bioinformatics by: training students; starting a research group; co-organizing international events in Africa; and looking for funds in Bioinformatics for pathogen and disease vectors. She did train the PhD student Sondos Smandi, who is going to work on the present project and who has extracted the fragments of ~1800 L.major 3’UTR, deduced from the SAGE libraries generated by LIVGM, that will be used in the framework of this project. All computing requirements are fulfilled for a successful execution of the proposed project, including 2 LINUX computers, 1 file server, 1 cluster of 10 computers, and adequate bioinformatics softwares.

Selected Publications:

1. Guerfali, F., D., Laouini, L., Guizani-Tabbane, F., Ottones, K., Ben-Aissa, O., Mghirbi, L., Manchon, S., Smandi, A., Benkahla, T., Commes, D., Piquemal, J. Marti and K. Dellagi (2007). Invade silently to live quietly: Leishmania major infection induces discreet but selective changes in human macrophage Transcriptomes. Submitted to Genome Biology.

2. Smandi, S., F., Guerfali, D., Mallouche, K., Ben-Aissa, O., Mghirbi, L., Guizani-Tabbane, D., Laouini, A., Benkahla and K. Dellagi (2007). Global analysis of Leishmania genes expression using SAGE libraries. Oral presentation at the Conference on the Bioinformatics of of African Pathogens and Disease Vectors (May 28-31, Nairobi-Kenya) and paper in preparation.
3. Benkahla, A., L., Guizani-Tabbane, I., Abdeljaoued-Tej and S. Ben Miled (2007). Systems Biology and infectious diseases. Chapter in preparation for a Handbook of “Research on Systems Biology Applications in Medicine”; Editor: Dr Andriani Daskalaki, Max-Planck Institute, Berlin.
4. The International Chimpanzee Chromosome 22 Consortium (2004) DNA sequence and comparative analysis of chimpanzee chromosome 22. Nature 429:382-388.

Participation in research projects:

Project: SYSCO

Synergy with LEISHDRUG: Modelling of the immune response to Leishmania infection

Type of Instrument: EU-STREP

Project: Ingénierie biomoléculaire MERST-IPT-CNRS-Université de la Méditerranée

Synergy with LEISHDRUG: Generate SAGE libraries

Type of Instrument: LIA

Project: Global analysis of Leishmania genes expression using SAGE libraries

Synergy with LEISHDRUG: Extract L.major 3’UTR

Type of Instrument: WHO-REENTRY