Steinmetz Group

Animals, particularly those inhabiting coastal marine environments, are routinely exposed to environmental stresses such as abrupt changes in temperature, oxygen, or food supply. Ongoing climate change is expected to intensify both the frequency and magnitude of these challenges.

While animal resilience to environmental stress has been well studied at ecological, physiological and biochemical levels, the cellular- and tissue-level mechanisms that enable rapid, flexible and reversible responses remain largely unexplored. Our research aims to uncover how such plasticity is generated across biological scales, from gene regulation and cell metabolism to tissue dynamics and whole-organism responses.

The sea anemone Nematostella vectensis lives in shallow salt marshes and estuaries and is therefore adapted to withstand extreme changes in salinity, temperature, oxygen concentration, and food supply on a daily basis. Its amenability to state-of-the-art imaging and genetic tools (e.g., CRISPR/Cas9-mediated mutants or knock-ins) makes it a powerful system to study stress resilience across biological levels.

Over the last years, we have made major contributions toward understanding the cellular basis of nutrient transport (Lebouvier et al. 2022 (external link)) and extreme starvation resilience in Nematostella (Garschall et al., 2024 (external link)). We discovered evolutionarily conserved aspects of lipid transport during oogenesis (Lebouvier et al., 2022 (external link)), and a population of stem-like cells that contributes to both germline and somatic lineages (Miramón-Puértolas et al. 2024 (external link); Pascual-Carreras et al., 2025 (external link)). During prolonged starvation, these stem-like cells enter a deep quiescent state, likely protecting them from starvation stress (Pascual-Carreras et al., 2025 (external link)). In addition, we identified epithelial cell extrusion as an ancient epithelial remodelling mechanism underlying extensive cell loss induced by starvation (Fournon-Berodia et al., 2025 (external link)).

Current projects focus on the reversible epigenetic, transcriptional and metabolic transitions between feeding and starvation, with particular emphasis on mitochondrial metabolism and dynamics. Future projects aim to extend these studies to additional environmental stresses (e.g., temperature, hypoxia) and to investigate how metabolic and mitochondrial plasticity cooperates with tissue-level remodelling.

Our ongoing and future research focuses on:

• the role of metabolic plasticity in enabling cellular adaptation to environmental stress
• mitochondrial flexibility in cellular and organismal resilience
• the effects of temperature shocks and hypoxia on cell behaviour and tissue dynamics