Our world is dynamic!

We live in a world that spins around its axis with a period close to 24 h. This has created rhytmic changes in the environment, such as the day-night cycle, or changes in temperature, humidity, UV light. This in turn has shaped the evolution of most organisms that live on earth, which have evolved an internal time-keeping mechanism to help them predict these changes: the circadian clock.

My current research interests

Plants have inherent plasticity. Their general body plan is genetically encoded, but plant architecture can be modified to adjust to the environment that surrounds it. In this sense, environmental signals have a profound effect on plant growth and development, ultimately affecting a plant’s fitness, disease resistance and productivity. An important feature of this process is the “gating” of signals through the plant’s internal clock, which results in the rhythmical inhibition of the activity of environmental inputs to ensure proper temporal coordination of regulatory processes. Besides its obvious relevance for crop improvement, research into time-of-day dependent modulation of plant plasticity will advance understanding of this fundamental property that underlies the extraordinary evolutionary success of plants.

Brief Bio

I am a circadian biologist that has ventured into photobiology and bioinformatics, now combining all to answer fundamental biological questions in plant sciences. I have strong background expertise in the molecular biology and physiology of circadian rhythms, photobiology, next-generation sequencing and bioinformatics analysis.

During my PhD, I helped establish the first circadian Caenorhabditis elegans lab of Argentina and build a South American network of worm labs. As part of a neuroscience team (Golombek lab, Argentina), I pioneered the discovery of many circadian behaviours in this organism. After this, for my first postdoc, I devoted my research to understanding how environmental cues and endogenous rhythms could regulate alternative splicing (AS) events in plants, hence affecting their physiology (Yanovsky lab, Fundacion Instituto Leloir, Argentina). For this, I switched models and quickly transitioned into working with Arabidopsis thaliana. There, I performed the first circadian mRNAseq time-series of these plants and developed a powerful bioinformatics analysis pipeline to analyse circadian gene expression and AS events. I later moved to Scotland for my second postdoc (Halliday Lab, University of Edinburgh, UK) to gain insights into how light affects leaf development in A. thaliana. Currently, my research is focused on understanding how plants optimise their growth and development in response to a changing environment. To do this, I secured a Marie Sklodowska-Curie fellowship and moved to the Plant Ecophysiology Group at UU.

I also have a personal interest on promoting an equal and diverse research culture (previously as an EDI committee member, SBS, UoE, UK), and am a strong advocate for open science and making research data FAIR (previously in the UK as part of: BioRDM team, ReproducibiliTEA, EORC – SBS, UoE). Additionally, I am an Executive ECR Member of Edinburgh Plant Science, where we focus on building bridges between different Edinburgh plant science research nodes to connect research to society. I am now focusing on building bridges between EPS and plant science in the Netherlands.