Jean-Louis Mergny graduated from Ecole Normale Supérieure (Paris) and got his PhD in Pharmacology (University Paris VI) in 1991 under the supervision of T. Garestier & M. Rougée (Triple-helices: spectroscopic studies). He went for a postdoctoral position in Basel, Switzerland with W. Gehring (Biozentrum). Afterwards he was hired by INSERM in 1993 in the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle, where he worked mainly on nucleic acids structures from a biophysical point of view. He was promoted Research Director in 2002. JL Mergny joined the IECB at the end of 2009 and became IECB director in Jan 2015.

Jean-Louis joined the Optics and Biosciences Laboratory at the École Polytechnique in 2020 and became head of the Biology Department at the Institut Polytechnique de Paris. In 2022 he co-founded with Abdul Barakat the interdisciplinary center Engineering4Health and became its scientific co-director.

The research themes are focused on the study of unusual conformations of nucleic acids:

• Roles in essential biological processes such as transcription
• Study of ligands of these structures with antiviral, antiparasitic or antitumor activity
• In silico search for G-quadruplexes motifs in the genomes of viruses, pathogenic bacteria, Archaea...

Experimental techniques currently used and developed:

• Absorbance, fluorescence and circular dichroism spectroscopy; in vitro screening methods
• Separative techniques: electrophoresis, exclusion chromatography
• Bioinformatics analyses

Recent and current research projects include:
    • Quadruplexes in Archaea
    • Implication of unusual nucleic acid structures in genomic instability and carcinogenesis.
    • Antiviral effects of quadruplex ligands: applications to coronaviruses and filoviruses
    • Methodological developments around the prediction and characterization of these structures