Nature has spent billions of years perfecting the proteins that make life possible: microscopic machines so sophisticated they can make a squid vanish before your eyes can catch it, and yet, when they go wrong, can lead to devastating diseases like Alzheimer’s. During my talk, I will introduce a new method that lets us manipulate protein’s structure, allowing us to mimic nature’s most remarkable tricks and advance our understanding of pathological processes such as neurodegenerative diseases.
I will first present the main characteristics of the climate and weather observed on Mars today. Then the geology visible at the surface indicating changes in climate. Finally, we will explore what we currently understand about these past climates and what remains to be discovered.
The monitoring of human health benefits is aided by the distribution of chemical elements within the body, such as calcium, copper, or zinc, providing valuable insights into the regulation and dysregulation of biological processes. In recent years, a field known as “metallomics” has emerged to explore the role of these elements in living systems. By borrowing high-precision analytical techniques originally developed in geosciences, it is now possible to investigate not only the concentration of metals in biological fluids such as blood, urine, or cerebrospinal fluid, but also subtle variations in their natural isotopic composition. These small differences, measurable thanks to advances in mass spectrometry, offer a new window into human physiology and disease. In this talk, I will use two examples to illustrate how isotopic analyses can provide new insights into human physiology and contribute to the development of innovative diagnostic approaches.