Antoine Danchin

Who is Antoine Danchin?

Antoine Danchin is a French geneticist known for his research in several fields of biology, from the structure and function of adenylate cyclase, to modelisation of learning in the nervous system and the early development of genomics and bioinformatics. He is the Chairman of the startup AMAbiotics, specialised in metabolic bioremediation and synthetic biology. He was the director of the Department Genomes and Genetics at the Institut Pasteur in Paris where he headed the Genetics of Bacterial Genomes Unit.

Trained as a mathematician at the Institut Henri Poincaré and a physicist at the École Polytechnique, Danchin has an Erdős number of 3. Working first with Mildred Cohn, Marianne Grunberg-Manago and Ionel Solomon in Nuclear Magnetic Resonance, Danchin became an experimental microbiologist in the early seventies. He created with Philippe Courrège and Jean-Pierre Changeux at the Institut de Biologie Physico-Chimique in Paris, France, a working seminar where they worked together on the construction of mathematical models of learning and memory.