Madeleine Gans

Career In 1952, she became "Chargée de recherche" (Research project leader). From 1953 onwards she switched to a university teaching career, first as « Chef de travaux pratiques » (Head of the laboratory courses) at the Sorbonne. In 1957, she left the IBPC to establish a research team with Georges Prévost in the CNRS Physiological Genetics Centre in Gif-sur-Yvette. She started as a professor from 1961. In 1968 Gans joined the Molecular Genetics Centre at the CNRS in Gif-sur-Yvette. Gans retired in 1990. and the use of the dicaryotic phase to answer fundamental questions concerning nuclear exchanges. The work mainly focused on the study of the pyrimidine and arginine pathways. The fine structure map of the ur-1 complex locus was determined. These two genes control the first two stages of the pyrimidine biosynthetic pathway. In Coprinus the results obtained led to a model whereby carbamyl-phosphate would be produced by two enzymatic complexes having different cellular localizations: mitochondrial for the enzymes of the arginine chain and cytoplasmic for those of the pyrimidine chain.

As of 1970, Gans returned to the Drosophila model and focused on the identification and analysis of mutants involved in development. Gans and collaborators undertook several systematic mutagenesis using Ethyl-Methane-Sulfonate (EMS) to screen for such female-sterile mutations linked to the X chromosome, leading to specific anomalies in the embryo, larva or adult specifically. Gans also worked on the female-sterile mutants named ovoD, and she determined that some viable flies among the progeny did not result from mitotic recombination but rather from phenotypic reversion of ovoD mutations in the female germ line.

Selected publications

Awards and honors in 1987 Gans was named a correspondent of the French Academy of Sciences.