April 2026
After a long delay, I am delighted to announce the new preprint of the lab:
- Pierre-Antoine Ferracci and Françoise Helmbacher. Fat1 deletion enhances Fibro-Adipogenic Differentiation and Adipogenic expansion following injury in skeletal muscle. biorxiv, (2026). April 2026 | DOI | PDF |
After having identified the FAT1 Cadherin gene as key for neuromuscular morphogenesis, we wondered if Fat1 was contributing to myogenic repair in adult skeletal muscle. This led us to uncover a new function for Fat1 in homeostasis of Fibro-adipogenic Progenitors (FAPs). FAPs are muscle-resident mesenchymal cells known both for their pro-myogenic activity in healthy muscle, and for contributing to fibro-fatty infiltrations in muscle pathologies. We found that Fat1 ablation in the mesenchymal lineage enhances fibro-adipogenic differentiation and adipose infiltrations after glycerol injury. The use of an inducible CRE line and lineage tracing showed that this negative control of adipogenesis involves both cell-autonomous and non-cell-autonomous functions. This identifies Fat1 as a novel modulator of fibro-adipogenic differentiation, and establishes mesenchyme-specific Fat1 mutants as a model of exacerbated fibro-fatty infiltrations after glycerol injury.
Update March 2026
Our move to the MMG is on its way and almost finalized. Here is a Picture of Charline and Clara at the Lab Christmas party in December 2025.
July 4th, 2025
One more success: Congratulations to Charline YTIER, who was awarded the Best Poster Prize at the Young Researcher Colloquium of the AFM-Telethon (Parc Floral, Paris) !!! 👏🏅🎉😊.
July 1st, 2025
Celebration time once more !!! 🏅🎉👏.
Contratulations to Clara DAVID, who officially won a PhD fellowship from the AMU Doctoral School ED658, to work with us on the mechanisms of intramuscular fibroadipose infiltrations in neuromuscular pathologies. Welcome Clara!
February 2025
Celebration time again ! 😊👏🎉.
CNRS and INSERM have officially approved my request of mobility ! So In the coming months, we (Charline and I) will leave IBDM, and will join the MMG (Marseille Medical Genetics lab) in Marseille, merging with the team of Frederique Magdinier. We should be officially moving some time soon (to be announced later). Our research will be supported with Grants from AFM-Telethon and from the FRC, as already announced. We are now making our mice ready for this new adventure …
July 2024
Lots of good news today (08/07/2024), and celebration time! 😊🎉.
We were awarded two grants for our projects on FAPs, one from the FRC (Federation pour la recherche sur le cerveau), in Collaboration with Frederique Magdinier (MMG), and one from AFM-Telethon, both for two years. In addition, Charline Ytier was awarded a PhD fellowship from AFM-Telethon and will start her PhD with us! Congrats Charline!!!
And, I successfully defended my HDR on june 21st!
Excellent beginning of a nice summer!
May 2024
Paper publication day (24/05) 😊🎉.
I’m thrilled to share that our review article, written in collaboration with Osvaldo Contreras, Marcelo Flores-Opazo, Daniel Kopinke, and Gordon S. Lynch, is now published in Molecular Aspects of Medicine.
Marcelo Flores-Opazo, Daniel Kopinke, Françoise Helmbacher, Rodrigo Fernández-Verdejo, Mauro Tuñón-Suárez, Gordon S. Lynch, Osvaldo Contreras. Fibro-adipogenic progenitors in physiological adipogenesis and intermuscular adipose tissue remodeling. Molecular Aspects of Medicine (2024), June, 101277. | PDF | PMID : 38788527 |
Mars 2024
After having postponed it for way too long, and having wasted university approvals obtained in 2006 and 2011, I finally made obtaining my habilitation to direct researches (HDR) the priority of 2024. The date of my long due HDR defense has been fixed to 21/06/2024 (Amphi 12, 14h00, Luminy Campus).
October 2023
An apology for the lack of updates recently. We are excited to move back to the main building before the end of this month.
Among other long due updates, we were thrilled to be awarded an incentive action grant by the MarMaRa (Marseille Maladies Rares) Institute from Aix-Marseille University, to develop, in mice and in human IPS cells (in collaboration with F. Magdinier, MMG), a CRISPR/AAV-based method to block fibro-adipogenic differentiation in muscle pathologies.
Besides this, I was promoted CRHC at the CNRS, effective since April 2023 (and retroactive as of 10/2022). On a personal side, I’ve had two CT-scans in a row concluding complete remission after a 2023 recurrence.
April 2023
Congrats to our collaborators Rui Li & al from the lab of Stefan Offermanns at the Max Planck Institute for Heart and Lung Research, for a great paper showing that FAT1 controls YAP/TAZ degradation via the E3 ligase MIB2 during angiogenesis. DOI: 10.1038/s41467-023-37671-x
September 2022
Happy to share our new preprint “An intragenic FAT1 regulatory element deleted in muscular dystrophy patients drives muscle and mesenchyme expression during development”.
This is a long due follow up of our past discovery of FSHD-associated Copy number variants deleting a putative FAT1 enhancer (Caruso et al., Plos Genetics 2013). We have explored this possibility by investigating the transcriptional activity of this putative enhancer in vivo.
- Nathalie Caruso, Angela K. Zimmermann, Tarana Nigam, Celine Becker, Karelia Lipson, Françoise Helmbacher. “An intragenic FAT1 regulatory element deleted in muscular dystrophy patients drives muscle and mesenchyme expression during development” Biorxiv (2022), September 17 | doi: 10.1101/2022.09.14.507898 | PDF
January 2022
I’m delighted to share that the manuscript “Astrocyte-intrinsic and extrinsic Fat1 activities regulate astrocyte development and angiogenesis in the retina” is now published in Development (2022) | doi:10.1242/dev.192047 | PDF |
This study uncovers astrocyte-intrinsic and extrinsic Fat1 activities that influence astrocyte migration polarity, proliferation and maturation, the disruption of which impacts retinal vascular development and maintenance of vascular architecture.
See all NEWs
helmbacherlab.org 