DrBaptiste Brule

I am a Research Associate in Neuroepigenomics at UK DRI based at Imperial College of London.

With a background of neurobiologist, I did my master's internship and my PhD on epigenetics in Huntington's disease (HD) in the team of Dr. Karine Merienne (LNCA, University of Strasbourg, France). During my master, I studied the link between the metabolic and epigenetic alteration in HD mice brain, with a focus on the enzymes of ACoA synthesis. During my thesis, I used FANS-sorting coupled to ChIPseq and CUT&Tag to decipher the epigenetic profile of striatal neurons from HD mouse models. This work notably enlightened that HD vulnerable neurons exhibit an accelerated epigenetic aging defined by a derepression of developmental genes coupled to a loss of neuronal identity. We identified that these epigenetic alterations implicate modifications of Polycomb repressive complexes components and functions. In the same time, I housed HD models in an enriched environment to study its effect on the disease course and to define its impact on the epigenetic alteration. To do so, I applied behavioral assessments (doubleH maze, rotarod, light-dark box, openfield, actimetry, novel object location task, nesting quality, ...) as well as -omics and immunohistological approaches.

In 2025, I joined the team of Dr. Alexi Nott at UK-DRI / Imperial College of London, to define the epigenetic profile of vascular & immune cells in brain samples from Alzheimer's patients. By expressing up to 30 of the 45 AD risk genes, these cell types, at the interface between brain and blood, have a key role in the predisposition to AD. Thus, it remains essential to determine how these brain vascular cell types are primed by AD risk variants and how does it contribute to AD pathology. I am leading research project to answer these questions by using single-cell CUT&Tag on FANS sorted nuclei coming from Alzheimer's patients' brain.