Overview

I am a tenured researcher ( "chargée de recherche" ) at the Inria centre at the University of Bordeaux, France. My research is at the interface of computational biology, computer science and systems biology. My main objective is to develop methods and models for the analysis of microbial communities, and in particular to generate hypotheses on the functions they harbour and the interactions they establish. To that end, I am interested in metagenomics, metabolic modelling and optimisation problem solving.

For an overview of the research themes addressed in the team, take a look at our most recent review. [Read more]

I summarise below some of our recent works.

Together with colleagues, notably the Hildebrand group at the Quadram Institute and Earlham Institute, we proposed the concept of enterosignatures as a mathematical model describing the microbial guilds inhabiting the human gut microbiome. In our paper published in Cell Host and Microbe in 2023, we show that the gut microbiome variability can be accurately described by combinations of enterosignatures among five. We demonstrate the relevance of the concept to compare microbiome compositions in individuals, study the changes over lifetime and after perturbations, and also detect atypical microbiome compositions. [Read more]

In a collaborative work around the PhD of Maxime Lecomte, we built metabolic models and analysed the dynamics of a three species bacterial community during cheese production. With this digital twin obtained using metabolic network refinement, dynamic flux balance analysis and omics data integration, we showed the contribution of the species in the production of aroma compounds. This works illustrates both the potential and the complexity of inferring the dynamics of metabolic interactions within microbial community at the metabolic level, even in small communities. [Read more]

Numerical models of the metabolism are great, but they cannot always be applied. When focusing on screening the metabolic potential of large collections of microbial genomes, or large-size microbial communities, a simpler model can be useful to efficiently assess the putative roles of each species. To that end, a significant part of my research as been dedicated to use a discrete, Boolean-based, model of metabolic producibility as a proxy to understand the metabolism of species in their environment. I tackled this problem using combinatorial optimisation problem solving, for instance for minimal community selection in a paper published in Bioinformatics in 2018. One of my recent projects published in eLife is the development of an all-in-one pipeline for the screening of large microbial communities using discrete metabolic modelling [Read more]

Overall my research spans over statistical learning, numerical modelling, and machine reasoning. I am always looking for new collaborations and new challenges. Do not hesitate to contact me if you are interested in working together.

Current projects in which I am involved include:

Past projects in which I was involved include:

Publications

Works ahead!

Some conference references and/or pdf may be missing due to delays in website updates. Google Scholar is most likely up-to-date.


  1. Chabname Ghassemi-Nedjad, Mathieu Bolteau, Lucas Bourneuf, Loic Pauleve, and Clemence Frioux. Seed2LP: seed inference in metabolic networks for reverse ecology applications. bioRxiv, 2024.
    preprint

  2. Maxime Lecomte, Wenfan Cao, Julie Aubert, David James Sherman, Hélène Falentin, Clémence Frioux, and Simon Labarthe. Revealing the dynamics and mechanisms of bacterial interactions in cheese production with metabolic modelling. Metabolic Engineering, 2024.

  3. Klara Cerk, Pablo Ugalde‐Salas, Chabname Ghassemi Nedjad, Maxime Lecomte, Coralie Muller, David J. Sherman, Falk Hildebrand, Simon Labarthe, and Clémence Frioux. Community‐scale models of microbiomes: Articulating metabolic modelling and metagenome sequencing. Microbial Biotechnology, 17(1) :e14396, 2024.

  4. Clémence Frioux, Rebecca Ansorge, Ezgi Özkurt, Chabname Ghassemi Nedjad, Joachim Fritscher, Christopher Quince, Sebastian M. Waszak, and Falk Hildebrand. Enterosignatures define common bacterial guilds in the human gut microbiome. Cell Host & Microbe, 2023.

  5. Arnaud Belcour, Jeanne Got, Méziane Aite, Ludovic Delage, Jonas Collén, Clémence Frioux, Catherine Leblanc, Simon M Dittami, Samuel Blanquart, Gabriel V Markov, and Anne Siegel. Inferring and comparing metabolism across heterogeneous sets of annotated genomes using AuCoMe. Genome Research, 2023.

  6. Clémence Frioux, Sylvie Huet, Simon Labarthe, Julien Martinelli, Thibault Malou, David Sherman, Marie-Luce Taupin, and Pablo Ugalde-Salas. Accelerating metabolic models evaluation with statistical metamodels: application to Salmonella infection models. In: ESAIM: Proceedings and Surveys, pp. 187–217 2023.

  7. Arnaud Belcour, Baptiste Ruiz, Clémence Frioux, Samuel Blanquart, and Anne Siegel. EsMeCaTa: Estimating metabolic capabilities from taxonomic affiliations. bioRxiv, 2022.
    preprint

  8. Hetty KleinJan, Clémence Frioux, Gianmaria Califano, Méziane Aite, Enora Fremy, Elham Karimi, Erwan Corre, Thomas Wichard, Anne Siegel, Catherine Boyen, and Simon M. Dittami. Insights into the potential for mutualistic and harmful host‐microbe interactions affecting brown alga freshwater acclimation. Molecular Ecology, 2022.

  9. Paola Fournier, Lucile Pellan, Didac Barroso-Bergadà, David A. Bohan, Thierry Candresse, François Delmotte, Marie-Cécile Dufour, Virginie Lauvergeat, Claire Le Marrec, Armelle Marais, Guilherme Martins, Isabelle Masneuf-Pomarède, Patrice Rey, David Sherman, Patrice This, Clémence Frioux, Simon Labarthe, and Corinne Vacher. The functional microbiome of grapevine throughout plant evolutionary history and lifetime. Advances in Ecological Research, 2022.

  10. Clémence Frioux and Anne Siegel. Problèmes d’optimisation combinatoire pour l’étude du métabolisme. In: Editions, I.S.T.E. (ed.) Approches symboliques de la modélisation et de l’analyse des systèmes biologiques, pp. 51–96, ISTE Group, 2022.

  11. Elham Karimi, Enora Geslain, Arnaud Belcour, Clémence Frioux, Méziane Aïte, Anne Siegel, Erwan Corre, and Simon M. Dittami. Robustness analysis of metabolic predictions in algal microbial communities based on different annotation pipelines. PeerJ, 9 :e11344, 2021.

  12. Falk Hildebrand, Toni I. Gossmann, Clémence Frioux, Ezgi Özkurt, Pernille Neve Myers, Pamela Ferretti, Michael Kuhn, Mohammad Bahram, Henrik Bjørn Nielsen, and Peer Bork. Dispersal strategies shape persistence and evolution of human gut bacteria. Cell Host & Microbe, 2021.

  13. Arnaud Belcour*, Clémence Frioux*, Méziane Aite, Anthony Bretaudeau, Falk Hildebrand, and Anne Siegel. Metage2Metabo, microbiota-scale metabolic complementarity for the identication of key species. eLife, 9 :e61968, 2020.

  14. Clémence Frioux, Dipali Singh, Tamas Korcsmaros, and Falk Hildebrand. From bag-of-genes to bag-of-genomes: metabolic modelling of communities in the era of metagenome-assembled genomes. Computational and Structural Biotechnology Journal, 18 :1722–1734, 2020.

  15. Mohammad Bahram, Tarquin Netherway, Clémence Frioux, Pamela Ferretti, Luis Pedro Coelho, Stefan Geisen, Peer Bork, and Falk Hildebrand. Metagenomic assessment of the global distribution of bacteria and fungi. Environmental Microbiology, 2020.

  16. Clémence Frioux, Simon M Dittami, and Anne Siegel. Using automated reasoning to explore the metabolism of unconventional organisms: a first step to explore host–microbial interactions. Biochemical Society Transactions, 48(3) :901–913, 2020.

  17. Simon M. Dittami, Erwan Corre, Loraine Brillet-Guéguen, Agnieszka P. Lipinska, Noé Pontoizeau, Meziane Aite, Komlan Avia, Christophe Caron, Chung Hyun Cho, Jonas Collén, Alexandre Cormier, Ludovic Delage, Sylvie Doubleau, Clémence Frioux, Angélique Gobet, Irene González-Navarrete, Agnès Groisillier, Cécile Hervé, Didier Jollivet, Hetty KleinJan, Catherine Leblanc, Xi Liu, Dominique Marie, Gabriel V. Markov, André E. Minoche, Misharl Monsoor, Pierre Pericard, Marie Mathilde Perrineau, Akira F. Peters, Anne Siegel, Amandine Siméon, Camille Trottier, Hwan Su Yoon, Heinz Himmelbauer, Catherine Boyen, and Thierry Tonon. The genome of Ectocarpus subulatus – A highly stress-tolerant brown alga. Marine Genomics, :100740, 2020.

  18. Bertille Burgunter-Delamare, Hetty KleinJan, Clémence Frioux, Enora Fremy, Margot Wagner, Erwan Corre, Alicia Le Salver, Cédric Leroux, Catherine Leblanc, Catherine Boyen, Anne Siegel, and Simon M. Dittami. Metabolic Complementarity Between a Brown Alga and Associated Cultivable Bacteria Provide Indications of Beneficial Interactions. Frontiers in Marine Science, 7 :85, 2020.

  19. Delphine Nègre, Méziane Aite, Arnaud Belcour, Clémence Frioux, Loraine Brillet-Guéguen, Xi Liu, Philippe Bordron, Olivier Godfroy, Agnieszka P. Lipinska, Catherine Leblanc, Anne Siegel, Simon M. Dittami, Erwan Corre, and Gabriel V. Markov. Genome–scale metabolic networks shed light on the carotenoid biosynthesis pathway in the brown algae saccharina japonica and cladosiphon okamuranus. Antioxidants, 8(11) :564, 2019.

  20. Clémence Frioux, Torsten Schaub, Sebastian Schellhorn, Anne Siegel, and Philipp Wanko. Hybrid metabolic network completion. Theory and Practice of Logic Programming, 19(01) :83–108, 2019.

  21. Clémence Frioux, Enora Fremy, Camille Trottier, and Anne Siegel. Scalable and exhaustive screening of metabolic functions carried out by microbial consortia. Bioinformatics, 34(17) :i934–i943, 2018.

  22. Méziane Aite, Marie Chevallier, Clémence Frioux, Camille Trottier, Jeanne Got, María Paz Cortés, Sebastián N. Mendoza, Grégory Carrier, Olivier Dameron, Nicolas Guillaudeux, Mauricio Latorre, Nicolás Loira, Gabriel V. Markov, Alejandro Maass, and Anne Siegel. Traceability, reproducibility and wiki-exploration for “à-la-carte” reconstructions of genome-scale metabolic models. PLOS Computational Biology, 14(5) :1–25, 2018.

  23. Clémence Frioux. Investigating host-microbiota cooperation with gap-filling optimization problems, PhD thesis, Université de Rennes 1, November 2018.

  24. Clémence Frioux, Torsten Schaub, Sebastian Schellhorn, Anne Siegel, and Philipp Wanko. Hybrid metabolic network completion. In: Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics), pp. 308–321, Springer, Cham, 2017.

  25. Julie Laniau, Clémence Frioux, Jacques Nicolas, Caroline Baroukh, María Paz Cortes, Jeanne Got, Camille Trottier, Damien Eveillard, and Anne Siegel. Combining graph and flux-based structures to decipher phenotypic essential metabolites within metabolic networks. PeerJ, 2017(10) 2017.

  26. Sylvain Prigent, Clémence Frioux, Simon M. Dittami, Sven Thiele, Abdelhalim Larhlimi, Guillaume Collet, Fabien Gutknecht, Jeanne Got, Damien Eveillard, Jérémie Bourdon, Frédéric Plewniak, Thierry Tonon, and Anne Siegel. Meneco, a Topology-Based Gap-Filling Tool Applicable to Degraded Genome-Wide Metabolic Networks. PLoS Computational Biology, 13(1) 2017.


  1. Maxime Lecomte, Wenfan Cao, Julie Aubert, David James Sherman, Hélène Falentin, Clémence Frioux, and Simon Labarthe. Revealing the dynamics and mechanisms of bacterial interactions in cheese production with metabolic modelling. Metabolic Engineering, 2024.

  2. Klara Cerk, Pablo Ugalde‐Salas, Chabname Ghassemi Nedjad, Maxime Lecomte, Coralie Muller, David J. Sherman, Falk Hildebrand, Simon Labarthe, and Clémence Frioux. Community‐scale models of microbiomes: Articulating metabolic modelling and metagenome sequencing. Microbial Biotechnology, 17(1) :e14396, 2024.

  3. Clémence Frioux, Rebecca Ansorge, Ezgi Özkurt, Chabname Ghassemi Nedjad, Joachim Fritscher, Christopher Quince, Sebastian M. Waszak, and Falk Hildebrand. Enterosignatures define common bacterial guilds in the human gut microbiome. Cell Host & Microbe, 2023.

  4. Arnaud Belcour, Jeanne Got, Méziane Aite, Ludovic Delage, Jonas Collén, Clémence Frioux, Catherine Leblanc, Simon M Dittami, Samuel Blanquart, Gabriel V Markov, and Anne Siegel. Inferring and comparing metabolism across heterogeneous sets of annotated genomes using AuCoMe. Genome Research, 2023.

  5. Hetty KleinJan, Clémence Frioux, Gianmaria Califano, Méziane Aite, Enora Fremy, Elham Karimi, Erwan Corre, Thomas Wichard, Anne Siegel, Catherine Boyen, and Simon M. Dittami. Insights into the potential for mutualistic and harmful host‐microbe interactions affecting brown alga freshwater acclimation. Molecular Ecology, 2022.

  6. Paola Fournier, Lucile Pellan, Didac Barroso-Bergadà, David A. Bohan, Thierry Candresse, François Delmotte, Marie-Cécile Dufour, Virginie Lauvergeat, Claire Le Marrec, Armelle Marais, Guilherme Martins, Isabelle Masneuf-Pomarède, Patrice Rey, David Sherman, Patrice This, Clémence Frioux, Simon Labarthe, and Corinne Vacher. The functional microbiome of grapevine throughout plant evolutionary history and lifetime. Advances in Ecological Research, 2022.

  7. Elham Karimi, Enora Geslain, Arnaud Belcour, Clémence Frioux, Méziane Aïte, Anne Siegel, Erwan Corre, and Simon M. Dittami. Robustness analysis of metabolic predictions in algal microbial communities based on different annotation pipelines. PeerJ, 9 :e11344, 2021.

  8. Falk Hildebrand, Toni I. Gossmann, Clémence Frioux, Ezgi Özkurt, Pernille Neve Myers, Pamela Ferretti, Michael Kuhn, Mohammad Bahram, Henrik Bjørn Nielsen, and Peer Bork. Dispersal strategies shape persistence and evolution of human gut bacteria. Cell Host & Microbe, 2021.

  9. Arnaud Belcour*, Clémence Frioux*, Méziane Aite, Anthony Bretaudeau, Falk Hildebrand, and Anne Siegel. Metage2Metabo, microbiota-scale metabolic complementarity for the identication of key species. eLife, 9 :e61968, 2020.

  10. Clémence Frioux, Dipali Singh, Tamas Korcsmaros, and Falk Hildebrand. From bag-of-genes to bag-of-genomes: metabolic modelling of communities in the era of metagenome-assembled genomes. Computational and Structural Biotechnology Journal, 18 :1722–1734, 2020.

  11. Mohammad Bahram, Tarquin Netherway, Clémence Frioux, Pamela Ferretti, Luis Pedro Coelho, Stefan Geisen, Peer Bork, and Falk Hildebrand. Metagenomic assessment of the global distribution of bacteria and fungi. Environmental Microbiology, 2020.

  12. Clémence Frioux, Simon M Dittami, and Anne Siegel. Using automated reasoning to explore the metabolism of unconventional organisms: a first step to explore host–microbial interactions. Biochemical Society Transactions, 48(3) :901–913, 2020.

  13. Simon M. Dittami, Erwan Corre, Loraine Brillet-Guéguen, Agnieszka P. Lipinska, Noé Pontoizeau, Meziane Aite, Komlan Avia, Christophe Caron, Chung Hyun Cho, Jonas Collén, Alexandre Cormier, Ludovic Delage, Sylvie Doubleau, Clémence Frioux, Angélique Gobet, Irene González-Navarrete, Agnès Groisillier, Cécile Hervé, Didier Jollivet, Hetty KleinJan, Catherine Leblanc, Xi Liu, Dominique Marie, Gabriel V. Markov, André E. Minoche, Misharl Monsoor, Pierre Pericard, Marie Mathilde Perrineau, Akira F. Peters, Anne Siegel, Amandine Siméon, Camille Trottier, Hwan Su Yoon, Heinz Himmelbauer, Catherine Boyen, and Thierry Tonon. The genome of Ectocarpus subulatus – A highly stress-tolerant brown alga. Marine Genomics, :100740, 2020.

  14. Bertille Burgunter-Delamare, Hetty KleinJan, Clémence Frioux, Enora Fremy, Margot Wagner, Erwan Corre, Alicia Le Salver, Cédric Leroux, Catherine Leblanc, Catherine Boyen, Anne Siegel, and Simon M. Dittami. Metabolic Complementarity Between a Brown Alga and Associated Cultivable Bacteria Provide Indications of Beneficial Interactions. Frontiers in Marine Science, 7 :85, 2020.

  15. Delphine Nègre, Méziane Aite, Arnaud Belcour, Clémence Frioux, Loraine Brillet-Guéguen, Xi Liu, Philippe Bordron, Olivier Godfroy, Agnieszka P. Lipinska, Catherine Leblanc, Anne Siegel, Simon M. Dittami, Erwan Corre, and Gabriel V. Markov. Genome–scale metabolic networks shed light on the carotenoid biosynthesis pathway in the brown algae saccharina japonica and cladosiphon okamuranus. Antioxidants, 8(11) :564, 2019.

  16. Clémence Frioux, Torsten Schaub, Sebastian Schellhorn, Anne Siegel, and Philipp Wanko. Hybrid metabolic network completion. Theory and Practice of Logic Programming, 19(01) :83–108, 2019.

  17. Clémence Frioux, Enora Fremy, Camille Trottier, and Anne Siegel. Scalable and exhaustive screening of metabolic functions carried out by microbial consortia. Bioinformatics, 34(17) :i934–i943, 2018.

  18. Méziane Aite, Marie Chevallier, Clémence Frioux, Camille Trottier, Jeanne Got, María Paz Cortés, Sebastián N. Mendoza, Grégory Carrier, Olivier Dameron, Nicolas Guillaudeux, Mauricio Latorre, Nicolás Loira, Gabriel V. Markov, Alejandro Maass, and Anne Siegel. Traceability, reproducibility and wiki-exploration for “à-la-carte” reconstructions of genome-scale metabolic models. PLOS Computational Biology, 14(5) :1–25, 2018.

  19. Julie Laniau, Clémence Frioux, Jacques Nicolas, Caroline Baroukh, María Paz Cortes, Jeanne Got, Camille Trottier, Damien Eveillard, and Anne Siegel. Combining graph and flux-based structures to decipher phenotypic essential metabolites within metabolic networks. PeerJ, 2017(10) 2017.

  20. Sylvain Prigent, Clémence Frioux, Simon M. Dittami, Sven Thiele, Abdelhalim Larhlimi, Guillaume Collet, Fabien Gutknecht, Jeanne Got, Damien Eveillard, Jérémie Bourdon, Frédéric Plewniak, Thierry Tonon, and Anne Siegel. Meneco, a Topology-Based Gap-Filling Tool Applicable to Degraded Genome-Wide Metabolic Networks. PLoS Computational Biology, 13(1) 2017.

  21. Teemu Haikarainen, Clémence Frioux, Li-Qing Zhnag, Duo-Chuan Li, and Anastassios C. Papageorgiou. Crystal structure and biochemical characterization of a manganese superoxide dismutase from Chaetomium thermophilum. Biochimica et Biophysica Acta (BBA) - Proteins and Proteomics, 1844(2) :422–429, 2014.


  1. Clémence Frioux, Sylvie Huet, Simon Labarthe, Julien Martinelli, Thibault Malou, David Sherman, Marie-Luce Taupin, and Pablo Ugalde-Salas. Accelerating metabolic models evaluation with statistical metamodels: application to Salmonella infection models. In: ESAIM: Proceedings and Surveys, pp. 187–217 2023.

  2. Clémence Frioux, Torsten Schaub, Sebastian Schellhorn, Anne Siegel, and Philipp Wanko. Hybrid metabolic network completion. In: Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics), pp. 308–321, Springer, Cham, 2017.


  1. Clémence Frioux and Anne Siegel. Problèmes d’optimisation combinatoire pour l’étude du métabolisme. In: Editions, I.S.T.E. (ed.) Approches symboliques de la modélisation et de l’analyse des systèmes biologiques, pp. 51–96, ISTE Group, 2022.


  1. Clémence Frioux. Investigating host-microbiota cooperation with gap-filling optimization problems, PhD thesis, Université de Rennes 1, November 2018.


  1. Chabname Ghassemi-Nedjad, Mathieu Bolteau, Lucas Bourneuf, Loic Pauleve, and Clemence Frioux. Seed2LP: seed inference in metabolic networks for reverse ecology applications. bioRxiv, 2024.
    preprint

  2. Arnaud Belcour, Baptiste Ruiz, Clémence Frioux, Samuel Blanquart, and Anne Siegel. EsMeCaTa: Estimating metabolic capabilities from taxonomic affiliations. bioRxiv, 2022.
    preprint

Scientific posters

My most recent work is often not yet published but we present posters at conferences to share our results with the community. My most recent posters are not presented by me but rather by young researchers I (co-)supervise. A list of those posters can be found on HAL.

Software

Here is some computational biology software I developed or for which I was involved to some extent in the development:

Seed2LP
Inference of seed metabolites in metabolic networks project
Tango models
Dynamic metabolic modelling of a microbial community from pure culture and community culture data Gitlab project
AuCoMe
Automatic Comparison of Metabolic networks from heterogeneously annotated genomes project
mpwt
A Python wrapper for multiprocessing the Pathway Tools software package, project
Metage2Metabo
Systematic screening of microbial communities' metabolic potential package, project
MiSCoTO
Screening of microbiota metabolic capabilities and selection of minimal (minimal-size, minimal-exchanges) communities package, project
AuReMe
Traceable and reproducible reconstruction of metabolic networks image, project ↗
Fluto
Graph-based and constraint-based hybrid gap-filling of metabolic networks Conda package, project
MeNeTools
Graph-based analysis tools for metabolic networks package, project
Meneco
Graph-based gap-filling of metabolic networks package, project