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Dr. Margaux Héritier

Senior Scientific Editor

About Margaux

Margaux’s early interest in health and how drugs work led her to a degree in Pharmaceutical Sciences. She’s currently pursuing a PhD using computational tools to design new drugs and study structural biology. She soon realised while practicing as a pharmacist how important science communication is when health professionals communicate with their patients, as this can have a significant impact on how they perceive and follow their treatment. She thinks Science provides an infinite source of wonder, and aims at sparking curiosity for interesting scientific stories thanks to breakers.

Margaux is the editor of 21 Breaks:

How the immune response to a common virus may target the brain in multiple sclerosis

We discovered that the immune response to a common virus called Epstein-Barr virus may be linked to multiple sclerosis by cross-reacting with a protein in the body called alpha-crystallin B . People who reacted to this protein were more likely to develop the disease, and this finding is a step forward in our understanding of how this common virus may cause disease in some people.

Dec 20, 2023 | 4 min read
What keeps trees grounded?

While exploring the root cause of trees' gravity sensing, the Morita lab stumbled upon proteins called ‘LAZY’ and dissected their association with the starch-filled packets in roots to dissolve a long-standing dilemma – is gravity sensed in terms of the force that the heavy starch-filled packets exert on the cell content or is it their position that send signals dictating where the Earth is?

Nov 24, 2023 | 3 min read
Gas in distant galaxies: mixed or matched?

Gas is an essential ingredient of galaxies because it fuels star and planet formation. Studying this gas is important because it tells us how galaxies form, evolve, and interact with their environment. In this work we studied 64 small, distant galaxies and found that the gas is not well-mixed which tells us how it is moving in, out and around the galaxies.

Nov 22, 2023 | 3 min read
Writing cell memory: how Histones play a role in Epigenetic Memory

Our cells remember their cell type-specific functions during their lifetime using modifications on histones, the proteins packaging DNA. Such epigenetic memory is challenged during DNA replication when histones are evicted from DNA. We reveal new evidence that cells recycle histones H2A-H2B to replicated DNA with their modifications, hereby providing epigenetic memory across cell division.

Oct 4, 2023 | 4 min read
The fate of a century-old partnership between humans and dolphins

Aligning human interests and wildlife protection requires a deep understanding of human-wildlife interactions. Behavioral tracking and demographic surveys show that foraging synchrony is key to generate short- and long-term benefits for human fishers and wild dolphins. We used simulations to describe the conditions under which this cooperation can turn into another human-wildlife conflict.

Sep 4, 2023 | 4 min read
Sharing a political ideology predicts more similar brain activity

Even when presented with the same information, liberals and conservatives tend to interpret political information differently. By measuring brain activity while partisans watched political videos or thought about political concepts, we show that individuals that are similar in their political beliefs exhibit similar brain patterns whilst processing political information.

Sep 1, 2023 | 3.5 min read