Frédéric JEAN-ALPHONSE
is a research scientist at the CNRS since 2020. He currently works with the BIOS team in the Department of Physiology of reproduction and behaviour at INRAE, in Nouzilly, France.
He obtained his PhD in 2008 at the University of Montpellier under the direction of Bernard Mouillac and Christiane Mendre where he characterised small molecule biased agonists as pharmacological chaperones to restore the anterograde traffic and function of several vasopressin type 2 mutant receptors involved in the congenital nephrogenic diabetes insipidus disease.
Since then, he kept a great interest on the receptor trafficking and its functional consequences. He next moved to the Imperial College London for a Postdoc in the laboratory of Aylin Hanyaloglu where he used confocal microscopy-based approach to show that gonadotropin receptors preferentially traffic to atypical endosomes known as pre-endosome. He demonstrated that this localisation serves as a requirement for both signalling and post-endocytic trafficking.
To learn more about the interplay between subcellular localisation of GPCRs and compartmentalised G protein-mediated signalling, he joined the University of Pittsburgh (USA) for a second postdoc in the laboratory of Jean-Pierre Vilardaga. There, he investigated the mechanisms involved in endosomal cAMP signalling generated by the parathyroid hormone receptor and highlighted the strong relationship between endosomal signalling and the calcium homeostasis in blood. He also contributed to describing the role of the mitochondria-localized melatonin 1 receptor in neuron survival.
Since 2020, he obtained a position at the CNRS, where his research focuses on GPCRs involved in the biology of reproduction. He is interested in deciphering the molecular mechanism and physiological relevance of compartmentalised signalling of gonadotrophin receptors. He is also developing an antibody-based strategy to manipulate the pharmacology of GPCRs for both in vitro and in vivo applications.