Alice Mayer
PhD
Postdoctoral Scientist
I've always been fascinated by the fact that our immune system, designed to protect us against pathogens and tumours, can also, in some circumstances, be harmful and trigger inflammatory or auto-immune diseases. During my PhD, I've been working on the role of environmental factors (as metabolic stress and IL-6 produced by dendritic cells) on T cell survival and function. I'm now focusing on the detection of viral nucleic acids by infected cells with the same desire of understanding the fine tuning of the immune response. I'm currently developing a genetic screen based on the CRISPR-Cas9 technique to dissect the signalling cascade triggered by the presence of DNA in the cytoplasm of cells. CRISPR-Cas9 is a new and powerful tool to modulate the expression of specific genes. I'm using a genome wide CRISPR library to investigate the potential role of about 19,000 genes in cytoplasmic DNA sensing. It's an unbiased approach to identify potential targets to modulate the immune response, in order to develop new anti-viral or anti-tumoral therapies, improve vaccine adjuvant or reduce the activation of the immune system in some inflammatory diseases. I'm also organising the Science Career Seminars on behalf of the WIMM postdoc association. Our aim is to inspire PhD students and post-docs to explore alternative career pathways in Science by inviting people who are working in different domains (research in academia or industry, communication, consultancy, patent law, bioinformatics, etc).
Recent publications
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Purification of Cyclic GMP-AMP from Viruses and Measurement of Its Activity in Cell Culture.
Journal article
Mayer A. et al, (2017), Methods Mol Biol, 1656, 143 - 152
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Pattern recognition receptor mediated downregulation of microRNA-650 fine-tunes MxA expression in dendritic cells infected with influenza A virus.
Journal article
Pichulik T. et al, (2016), Eur J Immunol, 46, 167 - 177
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Resistance of Dynamin-related Protein 1 Oligomers to Disassembly Impairs Mitophagy, Resulting in Myocardial Inflammation and Heart Failure.
Journal article
Cahill TJ. et al, (2015), J Biol Chem, 290, 25907 - 25919
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Viruses transfer the antiviral second messenger cGAMP between cells.
Journal article
Bridgeman A. et al, (2015), Science, 349, 1228 - 1232
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Corrigendum: CD90(+) Stromal Cells are Non-Professional Innate Immune Effectors of the Human Colonic Mucosa.
Journal article
Owens BMJ. et al, (2015), Front Immunol, 6
ORCID
0000-0002-6859-0612