Current lab members:

• Eric RÖTTINGER, DR2 CNRS
• Aldine AMIEL, IR2 INSERM (70%)
• Renaud REBILLARD, TCS CNRS (20%)
• Aurore VULLIEN, PhD student
• Rita ANDREONI, PhD student
• Kai HOFMAENNER, PhD student
• Mickael WURTZ, PhD student
• Marine DANIEL, IE CDD CNRS

Lab Alumni:

Certain marine animals such as cnidarians (sea anemones, corals and “jellyfish) possess so-called whole body regenerative capacities, as they can reform fully functional organisms from most isolated body parts or even dissociated cells. Another interesting property of symbiotic cnidarians is their ability to resists and adapt to high environmental stress, such as expositions to intracellular ROS, at levels known to be devastating for mammalian cells by enhancing the aging process. Importantly, this extreme regenerative potential, the impressive ROS resistance and plasticity to adapt to drastic environmental variations are accompanied by an extended lifespan / immortality in a large set of these marine animals. 

We take advantage of these interesting and intriguing biological features of cnidarians to decipher their underlying cellular, molecular, biochemical and genetic mechanisms. Our multidisciplinary and integrative research developed with local, national and international academic collaborators aims to obtain a novel view of cnidarian regeneration, stress response and extreme longevity. Ultimately, our research will participate in improving our understanding of how these marine invertebrates prevent aging and age-related diseases, discoveries that will subsequently be transferred to vertebrate/human related research within the IRCAN and our network of collaborators with the long-term goal of creating novel opportunities for regenerative medicine and aging research.

Our principal research aims focusing on complementary anthozoan cnidarian research models, particularly the sea anemone Nematostella vectensis are:

A) Characterize the tissular, cellular and molecular mechanisms underlying whole body regeneration.

B) Understand the cellular and molecular mechanisms responsible for the high environmental stress resistance.

C) Determine how cnidarians prevent aging and aging-related diseases.

Resources developed by the team are available as soon as possible through freely accessible and intuitive online repositories (e.g. nvertx.kahikai.org). In addition to our research, members of the team are intensely involved in fostering interdisciplinary research (e.g. IFR MARRES) and teaching activities at the University Nice Sophia Antipolis and Université Côte d’Azur / University Cote d’Azur (e.g. MSc MARRES, Life Science School) as well as outreach activities (workshops, conferences, photo exhibitions) in tight interaction with the non-profit organization Kahi Kai (www.kahikai.org) in order to promote the importance of marine organisms for fundamental as well as applied aging research.

Current Projects

Top Publications

• Optimized husbandry and targeted gene-editing for the cnidarian Nematostella vectensis
  8 janvier 2025 par João E Carvalho
  Optimized laboratory conditions for research models are crucial for the success of scientific projects. This includes controlling the entire life cycle, having access to all developmental stages and maintaining stable physiological conditions. Reducing the life cycle of a research model can also enhance the access to biological material and speed up genetic tool development. Thus, we optimized the rearing conditions for the sea anemone Nematostella vectensis, a cnidarian research model to study…
• Creating a User-Friendly and Open-Access Gene Expression Database for Comparing Embryonic Development and Regeneration in Nematostella vectensis
  1 avril 2022 par Olivier Croce
  The sea anemone Nematostella vectensis has emerged as a powerful research model to understand at the gene regulatory network level, to what extend regeneration recapitulates embryonic development. Such comparison involves massive transcriptomic analysis, a routine approach for identifying differential gene expression. Here we present a workflow to build a user-friendly, mineable, and open-access database providing access to the scientific community to various RNAseq datasets.
• <em>Nematostella vectensis</em>, an Emerging Model for Deciphering the Molecular and Cellular Mechanisms Underlying Whole-Body Regeneration
  23 octobre 2021 par Eric Röttinger
  The capacity to regenerate lost or injured body parts is a widespread feature within metazoans and has intrigued scientists for centuries. One of the most extreme types of regeneration is the so-called whole body regenerative capacity, which enables regeneration of fully functional organisms from isolated body parts. While not exclusive to this habitat, whole body regeneration is widespread in aquatic/marine invertebrates. Over the past decade, new whole-body research models have emerged that…
• The sea anemone Nematostella vectensis, an emerging model for biomedical research: Mechano-sensitivity, extreme regeneration and longevity
  16 février 2021 par Aldine R Amiel
  Nematostella has fascinating features such as whole-body regeneration, the absence of signs of aging and importantly, the absence of age-related diseases. Easy to culture and spawn, this little sea anemone in spite of its "simple" aspect, displays interesting morphological characteristics similar to vertebrates and an unexpected similarity in gene content/genome organization. Importantly, the scientific community working on Nematostella is developing a variety of functional genomics tools that…
• Experimental Tools to Study Regeneration in the Sea Anemone Nematostella vectensis
  19 octobre 2020 par Aldine R Amiel
  Animal regeneration is a biological process leading to the reformation of injured or lost tissues/body parts. One of the most fascinating regenerative phenomena is the so-called whole-body regeneration, leading to the reformation of fully functional organisms within days after bisection. The sea anemone Nematostella vectensis is currently emerging as novel whole-body regeneration model. Here we describe the methods of inducing the regenerative process in this cnidarian as well as the fixation…
• Transcriptomic Analysis in the Sea Anemone Nematostella vectensis
  19 octobre 2020 par Jacob F Warner
  The sea anemone Nematostella vectensis is an emerging research model to study embryonic development and regeneration at the molecular and global transcriptomic level. Transcriptomics analysis is now routinely used to detect differential expression at the genome level. Here we present the latest procedures for isolating high-quality RNA required for next generation sequencing, as well as methods and resources for quantifying transcriptomic data.
• 7th Euro Evo Devo meeting: Report on the "Evolution of regeneration in Metazoa" symposium
  29 août 2019 par Eve Gazave
  Regeneration, the ability to restore lost parts of the body, is a widespread phenomenon in animals. While this ability is somehow limited in classical developmental model organisms, a variety of animals are able to regenerate complex structures such as limbs or important parts of their body, upon injury. Despite the recent emergence of regenerative studies using a large variety of metazoans, we still lack a general view of the evolution of animal regeneration. In the context of the 7th EvoDevo…
• NvERTx: a gene expression database to compare embryogenesis and regeneration in the sea anemone <em>Nematostella vectensis</em>
  10 mai 2018 par Jacob F Warner
  For over a century, researchers have been comparing embryogenesis and regeneration hoping that lessons learned from embryonic development will unlock hidden regenerative potential. This problem has historically been a difficult one to investigate because the best regenerative model systems are poor embryonic models and vice versa. Recently, however, there has been renewed interest in this question, as emerging models have allowed researchers to investigate these processes in the same organism….
• Diversity of Cnidarian Muscles: Function, Anatomy, Development and Regeneration
  8 février 2017 par Lucas Leclère
  The ability to perform muscle contractions is one of the most important and distinctive features of eumetazoans. As the sister group to bilaterians, cnidarians (sea anemones, corals, jellyfish, and hydroids) hold an informative phylogenetic position for understanding muscle evolution. Here, we review current knowledge on muscle function, diversity, development, regeneration and evolution in cnidarians. Cnidarian muscles are involved in various activities, such as feeding, escape, locomotion and…
• The rise of the starlet sea anemone Nematostella vectensis as a model system to investigate development and regeneration
  20 février 2016 par Michael J Layden
  Reverse genetics and next-generation sequencing unlocked a new era in biology. It is now possible to identify an animal(s) with the unique biology most relevant to a particular question and rapidly generate tools to functionally dissect that biology. This review highlights the rise of one such novel model system, the starlet sea anemone Nematostella vectensis. Nematostella is a cnidarian (corals, jellyfish, hydras, sea anemones, etc.) animal that was originally targeted by EvoDevo researchers…
• Nodal signaling is required for mesodermal and ventral but not for dorsal fates in the indirect developing hemichordate, Ptychodera flava
  17 mai 2015 par Eric Röttinger
  Nodal signaling plays crucial roles in vertebrate developmental processes such as endoderm and mesoderm formation, and axial patterning events along the anteroposterior, dorsoventral and left-right axes. In echinoderms, Nodal plays an essential role in the establishment of the dorsoventral axis and left-right asymmetry, but not in endoderm or mesoderm induction. In protostomes, Nodal signaling appears to be involved only in establishing left-right asymmetry. Hence, it is hypothesized that Nodal…

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