Odile Croissant

Odile Croissant (6 October 1923 – 3 August 2020) was a French biologist, physicist and specialist in electron microscopy. She trained in a number of countries, building her career from laboratory assistant to researcher at the Pasteur Institute. Croissant was one of the first scientists to develop techniques for the in situ detection of viral nucleic acids, and played a key part in the creation of the first physical map of the only human papillomavirus known at the time (HPV1).

Early life and education Odile Marcelle Marie Croissant was born in Honfleur in Normandy on 6 October 1923. In November 1942, she joined the Pasteur Institute in Paris, working as a secretary and laboratory assistant in the typhus laboratory headed by biologist Paul Giroud.

In 1945, she moved to the Virus Department of the Pasteur Institute, headed by Pierre Lépine. It was during this role that she was introduced to electron microscopy by the physicists who had designed the first French electron microscope. then at the Cavendish Laboratory at the University of Cambridge, and in 1950 at the University of Montreal in Canada. and Henri Saucier.

Croissant studied the structure of glass and the chemical reactions caused by scratching, using microdiffraction and electron microscopy techniques. On 10 January 1962, Croissant defended her thesis in physics at the University of Strasbourg, entitled "Study of the morphology and structure of silicate glasses using electron microscopy and electron microdiffraction" .

In 1978, she joined the Papillomavirus Unit created at the Pasteur Institute under the initiative of biologist François Gros, which was directed by Gérard Orth. She was part of the team's pioneering work, which highlighted the multiplicity of human papillomaviruses (HPV), the specificity of their pathogenicity and their oncogenic potential. The discoveries were made in collaboration with Michel Favre and Stefania Jablonska, a dermatologist at the Department of Dermatology at the Medical University of Warsaw. This work demonstrated the oncogenic potential of one of the human papillomaviruses (HPV5), identified in patients with epidermodysplasia verruciformis.

Selected publications

Chromatin-Like Structures in Polyoma Virus and Simian Virus 40 Lytic Cycle Characterization of a New Type of Human Papillomavirus That Causes Skin Warts Identification of Papillomaviruses in Butchers' Warts Analysis of human cancers, normal tissues, and verruce plantares for DNA sequences of human papillomavirus types 1 and 2 Specificity of cytopathic effect of cutaneous human papillomaviruses High Prevalence of Papillomavirus-Associated Penile Intraepithelial Neoplasia in Sexual Partners of Women with Cervical Intraepithelial Neoplasia Rearrangement of a common cellular DNA domain on chromosome 4 in human primary liver tumors Human papillomaviruses associated with cervical intraepithelial neoplasia. Great diversity and distinct distribution in low- and high-grade lesions SciSpace records 49 publications by Croissant