Basile Tarchini, Ph.D., developmental geneticist, joins Jackson Laboratory faculty

Bar Harbor, Maine - Basile Tarchini, Ph.D., a geneticist who studies the early developmental mechanisms organizing the inner ear in mammals, has joined The Jackson Laboratory research faculty as an assistant professor.

Tarchini, a Swiss citizen, earned his undergraduate degree and Ph.D. at the University of Geneva, in the laboratory of Professor Denis Duboule. He moved to Montréal, Canada, for a postdoctoral fellowship at the Institut de Recherches Cliniques de Montréal, where he was first a postdoc and then a research associate in the laboratory of Michel Cayouette, Ph.D.

“Fundamental to our interaction with the world,” Tarchini says, “hearing and balance rely on both the proper layout of movement detectors at the surface of hair cell—the stereocilia—and the uniform orientation of the bundles they form across neighboring cells. While deafness is the most common sensory impairment in humans and hair cell damage a leading cause, the molecular machinery imparting and connecting these two levels of planar polarity is still largely unknown.”

Last year Tarchini was the first author in a study, published in Developmental Cell, showing a
previously unknown role in the auditory system for a group of proteins known to control cell division. “We showed that these proteins occupy a specific region at the cell surface to define the exact placement of stereocilia and outline the V-shaped bundle,” he explains.

Tarchini became interested in the Jackson Laboratory research program on hereditary hearing impairment in mice directed by Associate Professor Kenneth Johnson, Ph.D. “As hair cells are scarce and encased in the bony labyrinth of the inner ear,” he says, “their development is best studied in mouse models, using genetics.”

Jackson Laboratory Vice President for Research and Professor Robert Braun, Ph.D., says, “JAX is well known for sensory research, such as Ken Johnson’s hearing work, Patsy Nishina’s studies on retinal degeneration and the glaucoma studies of Professor and Howard Hughes Medical Investigator Simon John. Basile is a cutting-edge developmental biologist who will bring an exciting new research program to JAX.”

Tarchini notes that mouse genetics guided his first steps in science. “Continuing today, my interests in the development of sensory cells in the inner ear are best addressed studying the mouse, an animal model greatly advanced at The Jackson Laboratory."

The Jackson Laboratory is an independent, nonprofit biomedical research institution and National Cancer Institute-designated Cancer Center based in Bar Harbor, Maine, with a facility in Sacramento, Calif., and a new genomic medicine institute in Farmington, Conn. It employs 1,600 staff, and its mission is to discover precise genomic solutions for disease and empower the global biomedical community in the shared quest to improve human health.