The BIOC laboratory, 50 years of molecular and cellular biology

On January 1, 1975, BIOC, the biochemistry laboratory, was officially created on the site of École Polytechnique, which had just moved to Palaiseau. It was the institution's first biology laboratory. “There was a desire to establish research and teaching in biology, particularly in its areas close to X's already strong disciplines such as chemistry, physics and mathematics,” explains Yves Mechulam, CNRS research director at BIOC.

Jean-Pierre Waller, Sylvain Blanquet and Andrea Parmeggiani have set up teams in this laboratory around a common theme: the mechanisms involved in decoding the messenger RNAs that enable proteins to be made in living organisms. This required an interest in the molecules behind the deciphering of the genetic code. At the time, molecular biology was still in its infancy, as the double helix structure of DNA was only elucidated in the 1950s, and the genetic code itself was only deciphered in the 1960s.

From genetic code to proteins

“In all living cells, including our own, the process of translating this genetic information into proteins takes place,” explains Emmanuelle Schmitt, BIOC's current Director. Proteins are essential to life, as they perform most cellular functions, such as the oxygen-carrying hemoglobin in the blood. The first step in this process is the copying of DNA into messenger RNA, made up of a sequence of nucleotide bases (A, C, G and U). This genetic message is then decoded in a complex mechanism by a molecular machine, the ribosome, which assembles amino acids to form proteins. The genetic code provides the correspondence between the RNA base sequence and the amino acids to be assembled.

Ribosomes are both evolutionary markers, interesting to study from a fundamental point of view because of their presence in all domains of living organisms (archaea, bacteria and eukaryotes) and because they are involved in numerous diseases and in antibiotic or anticancer treatments.

From the molecular to the cellular scale

In the 1990s, BIOC became involved in the development of so-called structural biology. This reveals the atomic structure of molecules in order to understand their mechanism of action. First protein crystallography, then cryo-electron microscopy were developed. A computational biology team has also been set up.

BIOC has also integrated cell biology into its field of expertise. Thus, in addition to studies of single-cell organisms such as bacteria and archaea, the laboratory has begun to study the phenomenon of cell migration in multi-cellular organisms (particularly important in cancers such as breast cancer) or, more recently, neurodegenerative diseases (Alzheimer's, prion diseases, etc.).

In 2020, this extension of the lab's research themes led to its renaming as the Structural Biology of the Cell Laboratory. The acronym BIOC, which has become well known in the community, remains unchanged. “In fifty years, the evolution of techniques has been spectacular,” emphasizes Emmanuelle Schmitt. DNA sequencers, cryo-electron microscopy, CRISPR/cas9 molecular scissors (which enable very precise genome modification), are just some of the scientific and technological advances that BIOC has rapidly integrated. Artificial intelligence has also made a remarkable entry, providing a tool for predicting three-dimensional structures based on decades of experimental structural biology. 

These advances have not, however, resolved all the fundamental questions posed since the origins of the laboratory, so rich and complex are the mechanisms involved. Much remains to be discovered over the next fifty years.

*BIOC: a joint research unit CNRS, École Polytechnique, Institut Polytechnique de Paris, 91120 Palaiseau, France