Sylvain DARNET, from Belèm to Strasbourg
Sylvain Darnet is joining the team Plant Isoprenoid Biology as a senior postdoc on a H2020 Marie Skłodowska-Curie fellowship / reintegration panel. His research project is focused on regulatory mechanisms at play in the biosynthesis and accumulation of phytosterols (‘High Phytosterol variants towards improved feedstocks and biofortification of crops’). Sylvain got his doctoral thesis at the IBMP, working on the functional characterization of sterol biosynthetic enzymes identified in the first sequenced plant genomes. After that he moved to Brazil at the University Federal of Pará in Belém to develop several projects on bioactive natural products from the Amazonia. He set up a phytochemical lab at the Instituto de Ciências Biológicas of UFPA, contributed to the development of NGS and bioinformatics as a support for diverse projects in functional phytochemistry (pepper, ‘açai’ palm) and also in human genetics. Sylvain Darnet is co-PI with Hubert Schaller of a cooperation program LIA UFPA-CNRS on terpene metabolism and thermal stress tolerance.