The 2006 Prize has been awarded to Didier MAZEL (Laboratory Head, Plasticity of Bacterial Genomes Unit in Institute Pasteur, Paris).
Didier Mazel has contributed to several important discoveries which open the way to development of new antibacterial agents.
He has first shown that the deformylase gene was the target of choice for new antibiotics because this gene uniquely present in bacteria is indispensable for microbial growth. Following this he has become interested in integrons, the structures which are characterized by their presence in tandem with the antibiotic resistance genes nearby to a gene coding for an integrase.
On the basis of the phylogenetic studies, Didier Mazel has proposed that the integrons existed even before the appearance of antibiotics. He then described the first ancestral super integron in Vibrio cholerae and demonstrated that it carried several dozen adaptation and virulence genes. He recently unraveled a novel mechanism for the integration of genetic elements within integrons. This, on the contrary to classical homologous recombination, relies on the recognition by the integrase of a structure in the target sequence which contains two pairs of non-matched bases.
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