Victor de Prado - new PhD student on transportomics!
On the 1st of August 2021 Víctor de Prado Parralejo started as a PhD student at DynaMo Center as part of the Villum investigator grant headed by Professor Barbara Ann Halkier.
The focus of Víctor’s PhD project is to assign function to the Arabidopsis transportome. The individual transporters will be expressed in Xenopus oocytes and tested for import and export activity using plant extracts with complex mixtures of metabolites as substrates. Victor will focus on the NPF transporter family that recently has been shown to encompass transporters of specialized metabolites. The PhD study includes development of a pipeline for metabolomics analysis together with PhD student Christos Theodorou to identify the transported metabolites. The generated data will be utilized to build an open access database with the substrate specificity space of the Arabidopsis transportome.
This novel way of assigning function to transporters will foreseeably contribute to deorphanizing uncharacterized transporters. Additionally, this work will question the currently assigned chemical space to described transporters, and enable re-thinking of their physiological implications currently found in the literature.
Víctor did his Bachelor’s in Biotechnology at the University of Barcelona, Spain, before joining the University of Copenhagen for his Master’s education in Biology-Biotechnology. His Master’s project was carried out at the DynaMo Center in Associate Professor Hussam Nour-Eldin’s group, where he worked on the development of an untargeted screen method to scrutinize the substrate spectra of membrane transporters. After his MSc degree Víctor continued to work at the DynaMo center as a research assistant before starting his PhD on the Villum investigator grant.
Victor will have Associate Professor Hussam Nour-Eldin as main supervisor and Professor Meike Burow as co-supervisor.