M2 internship offer - On-chip fertilization: Making a controlled microfluidic environment to decipher fertilization mechanisms

id="offer-description" class="ecl-u-type-heading-2 ecl-u-mt-none ecl-u-mb-l">Offer Description On-chip fertilization: Making a controlled microfluidic environment to decipher fertilization mechanisms. Location: École Normale Supérieure (Paris), Departments of Chemistry and Physics. Supervisors: Ayako Yamada ( [email protected] ), Christine Gourier ( [email protected] ) and Nicolas Rodriguez ( [email protected] ). Context and objective . Fertilization, the union of a sperm and an egg, is the founding event of life. Its success requires the fusion of one—and only one—sperm with an egg, as fusion of multiple sperm leads to pathological polyspermy. Despite decades of research, the mechanisms governing gamete fusion and subsequent block to polyspermy remain poorly understood. This limited understanding largely stems from the specificities of the gametes and the complexity of their mode of interaction. Eggs are enclosed within the fluid-filled perivitelline space (PVS), surrounded by the zona pellucida (ZP), a glycoprotein envelop that sperm has to traverse to interact and fuse with the egg plasma membrane. Advanced real-time imaging approaches of the gamete contact zone before and after fusion—including bright-field, confocal, and super-resolution microscopy such as STED—are essential to resolve the spatiotemporal sequence of transient events underlying sperm–egg fusion and the establishment of the block to polyspermy. However, under physiological in