Alexandra Dallaire

I am an assistant professor in the Département de biochemistry, microbiology and bioinformatics (Faculty of Science and Engineering) at Laval University, and my laboratory is in the Institut de biologie intégrative et des systèmes (IBIS). I completed a bachelor’s degree in biochemistry and a master’s degree and PhD in molecular and cellular biology at Laval University. I studied the roles of small non-coding RNAs called microRNAs in nematode aging and reproductive cell biology. My interest then turned to peculiar obligate symbionts of land plants, called arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF). During my postdoctoral work at the University of Cambridge (UK), I pioneered the investigation of epigenetic pathways in the model AMF species, Rhizophagus irregularis, by generating multi-omics data covering transcriptome, proteome, small RNAome and DNA methylome. I led a genome assembly and annotation project that produced a chromosome-scale reference genome for R. irregularis. As a fellow at the Royal Botanic Gardens Kew (UK), I developed computational tools to identify gene families that associate to transposable elements, which are used in comparative genomics approaches to find rapidly evolving genomic loci. I was the deputy team director of the RIKEN–Cambridge Joint Crop Symbiosis Research Team at the RIKEN Centre for Sustainable Resource Science (Japan), which applies cross-species single-cell and spatial transcriptomics approaches to study arbuscular mycorrhizal symbioses.