Welcome to Christos - new PhD student in metabolomics
On 1 September 2021, Christos Theodorou started as a PhD student at DynaMo Center as part of the newly initiated Villum investigator project headed by Professor Barbara Ann Halkier.
The focus of Christos’ PhD project is to develop a metabolomics pipeline for analysis of metabolites from extracts of Arabidopsis thaliana and from transporter assays in Xenopus oocytes using extracts as substrates.
The project includes characterization of the complex mixtures of metabolites in extracts from Arabidopsis thaliana at different developmental stages and after exposure to a number of abiotic and biotic stresses. The extracts will be used as substrates to screen each transporter in the Arabidopsis transportome for import and export activity and metabolomics will be used to analyze the transporter activity.
The generated data will be utilized to build an open-access database with the substrate specificity of the Arabidopsis transportome. Additionally, Christos will map and characterize the phytochemicals exuded on the Arabidopsis thaliana rhizo- and phyllosphere during the same abiotic and biotic stresses - to decode the chemical language of plants.
Christos is an analytical chemist, who did his MSc in Advanced and Applied Chemistry at the Technical University of Denmark. His MSc project focused on the isolation and elucidation of the structure of bioactive secondary metabolites from soilborne Actinobacteria. After his masters, he was employed by DTU Energy as a research assistant to carry out organic synthesis and characterization of chemical materials used in organic flow-batteries.
Link to Villum investigator grant
Christos will be supervised by Villum Investigator Professor Barbara Ann Halkier and LC-MS facility manager Dr. Christoph Crocoll from the DynaMo Center.