Maria Almonacid

Dr Maria Almonacid is a permanent CNRS researcher at the Center for Interdisciplinary Research in Biology (CIRB), Collège de France, Paris, France. She obtained her PhD in 2010 under the supervision of Anne Paoletti at Institut Curie, Paris. She then moved to Marie-Hélène Verlhac’s lab at CIRB for her post-doc, where she discovered a novel and very original mode of nucleus centering in mouse oocytes, relying on an activity gradient of a cytoplasmic actin mesh, and not on microtubules. She then obtained a permanent researcher position at CNRS in 2016 in the Terret-Verlhac lab. She recently found that nucleus centering in mouse oocytes is a mechano-transduction process that promotes agitation of the nucleus and its contents, including chromatin, thereby modulating gene expression. This explains why the centering of the nucleus is predictive of the quality of the female gamete and its developmental potential after fertilization. Her current projects are focusing on how mechano-transduction impacts nuclear architecture during nucleus centering in the mouse female gamete.