Patrice Humblot is a reproductive physiologist. He is presently Professor of Domestic Animal Reproduction at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (SLU) and will be become Prof. Emeritus under the end of the RUMIGEN project. The last 10 years he has developed, in collaboration with INRAE and the University of Lisbon, in vitro and in vivo models to study endometrial physiology and its sensitivity to stress and diseases. The effects of metabolic stress and inflammation on endometrial function were studied by using next generation sequencing methods to evaluate their impacts on the transcriptome and epigenome of the different endometrial cell types from well characterized animals or tissue. The results revealed the need to understand the specific response of the different cell type constituting the endometrium. Based on the above in vitro and in vivo models, similar approaches will be used in RUMIGEN (Work-package 7) in attempts to explain cow individual differences and related epigenetic mechanisms underlying the persistence of uterine inflammation during the post-partum period. This research aiming at identifying a set of epigenetic markers associated to persistent inflammation of the endometrium may contribute to the design of the genetic and/or diagnostic tools developed in other work-packages of the RUMIGEN project.
