Hassan Hijazi works at the Laboratoire Biologie et Biotechnologie pour la Santé – BioSanté.

His project: Altered dynamics of acylations of histone H3 Lysine 27 (H3K27): a mechanism contributing to transcriptional dysregulation in Huntington’s disease?

Hello world!

My name’s Hassan.

I graduated with an M2 in “Systems and Synthetic Biology” from Université Paris-Saclay and did my internship in Switzerland at ETH in Zürich. My project, which dealt with promoter engineering, motivated me to explore the protein landscape. For this purpose, I’ve joined the M2 program in Nanobiology at Université Grenoble Alpes (UGA). Finally, I did my internship at Institut de Biologie Structurale (IBS) where I assessed the impact of detergents on sequencing membrane proteins using MALDI mass spectrometry (MS).

Since then, MS has been readily sown into my genes. In my PhD project, I will apply MS-based proteomics approaches to probe specific epigenetic players in Huntington’s disease (HD). While we know that HD pathogenesis is due to the presence of a defective gene, the mechanistic causes of symptoms remain unclear. Unfortunately, until now, this brain disorder remains incurable and patients grappling with it suffer from movement, emotional, and mental impairments. The varied chemical modifications on key proteins known as histones, are clues to understanding the underlying aberrant molecular alterations that mark HD. Hopefully, if characterized, this could serve as a potential target for therapeutic drugs.

In this journey at EDyP Lab, my supervisors are Delphine Pflieger, Karine Merienne, and Christophe Battail.

For the rest, Grenoble is a cool place to practice hobbies. The surrounding countryside is endowed with a poetic and mesmerizing nature, and so a “randonnée” every so often is inescapable, not to mention other mountain sports. Playing football weekly is the cherry on my own personal cake! And for those who are fond of reading, there are free libraries in every nook and cranny.