biology

Pascale Cossart

Pascale Cossart is a biology topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand Pascale Cossart rather than just read about it. In short: Pascale Françoise Xavier Cossart (French pronunciation: [paskal kɔsaʁ]; née Gheerbrant; born 21 March 1948) is a French bacteriologist who is affiliated with the Pasteur Institute of Paris. She is the foremost authority on Listeria monocytogenes, a deadly and common food-borne pathogen responsible for encephalitis, meningitis, bacteremia, gastroenteritis, and other diseases.

Key takeaways

Pascale Cossart belongs to biology; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect Pascale Cossart to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of Pascale Cossart from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

Pascale Françoise Xavier Cossart (French pronunciation: [paskal kɔsaʁ]; née Gheerbrant; born 21 March 1948) is a French bacteriologist who is affiliated with the Pasteur Institute of Paris. She is the foremost authority on Listeria monocytogenes, a deadly and common food-borne pathogen responsible for encephalitis, meningitis, bacteremia, gastroenteritis, and other diseases.

Biography Cossart was born in the north of France in 1948. She grew up and attended school in Arras. Cossart earned a B.S. and M.S. from Lille University in 1968. She then earned an M.S. in chemistry from Georgetown University in 1971, and her Ph.D. in biochemistry at the Pasteur Institute and the University of Paris in 1977 (University Paris Diderot). She completed her postdoctoral fellowship at the Pasteur Institute. She is currently a Professor and Head of the Unité des Interactions Bactéries Cellules at the Pasteur Institute. In 1998, she received the Richard Lounsbery Prize and the L'Oréal-UNESCO Award for Women in Science. She was awarded the Balzan Prize for Infectious Diseases: Basic and Clinical Aspects in 2013.

Works Cossart's research has focused on infection by intracellular bacteria, and in particular the infectious agent Listeria monocytogenes. Listeria is a food-borne bacterial pathogen responsible for numerous illnesses and a mortality rate of 30%. The bacteria is one of the best models of intracellular parasitism because it is particularly hardy, able to survive in a variety of cells, cross multiple host barriers, and spreads through ActA, the protein responsible for actin-based motility. Cossart's work has shed light on the genetic and biochemical processes that make Listeria so effective and lethal, identifying the bsh gene; regulatory mechanisms such as an RNA thermosensor that control expression of the virulence genes such as bsh; and the ways in which Listeria enters cells and crosses physiological barriers such as the blood–brain barrier, the intestinal barrier, and the placental barrier. The discovery by Cossart's lab of the interaction between L. monocytogenes' protein, internalin, and its cell receptor, E-cadherin, was the first such study that successfully demonstrated the molecular mechanism that permits a bacterial agent to cross the placental barrier. In 2009 Cossart published what she describes as the first "bacterial operon map"—the transcriptional program that regulates Listeria's behavior in different environmental conditions. By comparing the sequences of Listeria drawn from soil and drawn from the human gut, Cossart identified non-coding RNAs that contribute to Listeria's virulence, identified additional RNA repressors, and determined that riboswitches can act both downstream and upstream. As part of her work she has also developed important biological tools, including a transgenic mouse that was the first animal model to overcome bacterial species-specificity. The mouse carried a human version of a host cell membrane receptor that L. monocytogenes used to enter cells.

Significant publications Cossart, Pascale; Boquet, Patrice; Normark, Staffan; Rappuoli, Rino, eds. (29 November 2004). Cellular Microbiology. Washington, DC, USA: ASM Press. doi:10.1128/9781555817633. ISBN 978-1-68367-203-6. Finlay, B. Brett (2001). "Cracking Listeria' s Password". Science. 292 (5522). American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS): 1665–1667. doi:10.1126/science.1062045. ISSN 0036-8075. PMID 11387462. S2CID 12009460. Toledo-Arana, Alejandro; Dussurget, Olivier; Nikitas, Georgios; Sesto, Nina; Guet-Revillet, Hélène; Balestrino, Damien; Loh, Edmund; Gripenland, Jonas; Tiensuu, Teresa; Vaitkevicius, Karolis; Barthelemy, Mathieu; Vergassola, Massimo; Nahori, Marie-Anne; Soubigou, Guillaume; Régnault, Béatrice; Coppée, Jean-Yves; Lecuit, Marc; Johansson, Jörgen; Cossart, Pascale (17 May 2009). "The Listeria transcriptional landscape from saprophytism to virulence". Nature. 459 (7249). Springer Science and Business Media LLC: 950–956. Bibcode:2009Natur.459..950T. doi:10.1038/nature08080. ISSN 0028-0836. PMID 19448609. S2CID 4341657.

Awards, prizes, and honorary lectures

References

External links "Professor Pascale Cossart". VinFuture. 22 October 2021. Retrieved 28 November 2021.

Illustrations

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with Pascale Cossart

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what Pascale Cossart claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In biology, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to Pascale Cossart before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about Pascale Cossart ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of Pascale Cossart

In research: Pascale Cossart appears in biology research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses Pascale Cossart in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: Pascale Cossart is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics 1948 births, 20th-century French biologists, 20th-century women biologists, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for Pascale Cossart outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

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How to study Pascale Cossart in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what Pascale Cossart means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain Pascale Cossart out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is Pascale Cossart in simple terms?

Why does Pascale Cossart matter?

Because it connects several biology ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study Pascale Cossart?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on Pascale Cossart.