PASCALE F. COSSART
Professor
Unit Head: Bacteria-Cell Interactions
Institut Pasteur, Paris, France
Senior International Research Scholar,
Howard Hughes Medical InstituteCOURTESY OF PASCALE COSSARTIn the early 1980s, Pascale Cossart was a researcher at the Institut Pasteur, working on the interaction of E. coli proteins with DNA, when the Pasteur’s scientific director encouraged her to switch to the study of infectious diseases so as not to have to compete with bigger laboratories working on E. coli in the U.S. A biochemist with no biology training, Cossart chose to work on the food-borne bacterium Listeria monocytogenes, a little-studied and intriguing intracellular pathogen that can have serious consequences if it infects a pregnant woman or travels to the brain. Those with a compromised immune system are particularly at risk from complications of a Listeria infection. “?This was a time when researchers were only just beginning to use molecular biology to study organisms other than E. coli,” says Cossart.
Cossart says she chose Listeria because a friend and colleague who worked with the species advised her that it would be a good choice for conducting infection-related molecular-biology experiments: “I really wanted to understand how the organism is able to penetrate and invade human cells.” Since then, Cossart has extended her reach to encompass a number of biology disciplines in addition to bacteriology: fundamental microbiology, cell and molecular biology, and epigenetics. Her research, illuminating many aspects of how Listeria infects humans and evades the immune system, has established the bacterium as a model for studying bacterial intracellular behavior and bacterial regulation of host-pathogen interactions. (See Cossart’s article “The Maverick Bacterium,” The Scientist, January 2010.)
Here, Cossart reflects on her career at the Pasteur, how she ...
