Damien Biot-Pelletier, PhD

Postdoctoral fellow / Evolutionary systems biology
e-mail:
damien.biot-pelletier.1 [at] ulaval.ca

Biography

I was born and raised in Montréal, where I so far spent the better part of my life. With the specific goal to pursue a career in scientific research, I did my undergraduate studies in biochemistry at Université de Montréal, where I enjoyed my first research opportunities. I then moved to McGill University for a master’s degree in microbiology, doing crystallography with bacterial membrane proteins. After an internship in the Department of Physiology at UCLA, I joined the laboratory of Pr. Vincent Martin at Concordia University for a Ph.D. in biology, where I applied metagenomics and genome editing methods studying the determinants of selection in evolutionary engineering experiments with yeast. After this challenging and rewarding experience, during which I discovered the fascinating field of evolutionary biology, I joined the corporate R&D labs at Lallemand Inc, a company specialized in the development, production and distribution of yeast and bacteria products. In this role, I continued nourishing my interests in evolution, working on several evolutionary engineering projects with various microbes. To further pursue these interests, I joined the Landry lab in February 2019.

 

Research interests

My broader interest is in understanding how environmental conditions and population structure constrain the trajectory of microbial evolution. Specifically, I am interested in evolutionary responses, in particular compensatory evolution, to the fitness cost of beneficial alleles. Therefore, I have a keen interest in epistasis, and antagonistic pleiotropy. I thrive designing and executing evolution experiments, and thoroughly enjoy genomics and computational biology work.

Publications

Biot-Pelletier D, Pinel D, Larue K, Martin VJJ, Determinants of selection in yeast evolved by genome shuffling. Biotechnol Biofuels. 11:282 (2018)

Sverzhinsky A, Fabre L, Cottreau AL, Biot-Pelletier DM, Khalil S, Bostina M, Rouiller I, Coulton JW, Coordinated rearrangements between cytoplasmic and periplasmic domains of the membrane protein complex ExbB-ExbD of Escherichia coli. Structure 22(5):791-7 (2014)

Biot-Pelletier D, Martin VJ, Evolutionary engineering by genome shuffling. Appl Microbiol Biotechnol. 98(9):3877-87 (2014)