Fitxa persona

I graduated in Biology in 2010, during my PhD (2011-2015) in the University of Valencia (UV) in Dr.Marcel·lí del Olmo Lab I investigated the mechanisms of stress response in budding yeast. This workresulted in 5 first author publications about the transcriptional control in response to osmotic stress and gave me extensive experience in yeast molecular biology, gene expression and stress signaling. I also did a 3-months short stay (Portugal) in the lab of Dr. Rodrigues-Pousada (ITQB, Oeiras, Portugal). During my first postdoc in Dr. Juan Carlos Igual Lab (UV, 2016-2017), I started to work in the mechanisms of cell cycle control. I discovered that Whi7 is a new transcriptional repressor of the G1/S transition, and that yeast cells rely on functional redundancy as security mechanism to ensure robust blockage of the G1 phase, mimicking what occurs in mammalian cells with the Retinoblastoma proteins family (Gomar-Alba et al., Nature Communications, 2017). Next, I did a comparative study to characterize the different regulation and function of the G1/S repressors, unveiling a major role for Whi7 repressor under cell wall stress response (Méndez*, Gomar-Alba*, et al., J. Cell. Sci, 2020. *co-first authors). In September 2017, I obtained a competitive postdoctoral fellowship (VALI+D, GVA) to join the Dr. Manuel Mendoza group (IGBMC, Strasbourg, France). During my 3 years of postdoc (France) in the Mendoza Lab I co-authored the first report of acetylation of Nuclear Pores Complexes as a mechanism to modulate Nuclear Pores functions and cell-specific cell cycle entry in yeast (Kumar et al., Nature Cell Biology, 2018). I also unveiled that the acetyltransferase Esa1 promotes mRNA export and cell cycle entry through NPC acetylation (Gomar-Alba et al., EMBO J, 2022). In addition, I contributed to several research lines in the team, published in the journals Nature Communications, Genetics and Frontiers in Genetics. In September 2020, I got a Juan de la Cierva Incorporación Fellowship to return to my home country as independent researcher, and joined the Lab of Dr. Juan Carlos Igual in Valencia. My current line of research investigates whether and how the functional specialization of Whi7 may be key to ensure the G1 brake under different stress conditions. We seek to identify the molecular mechanisms that connect the stress signaling pathways with the Start machinery, and characterize the impact of the G1 arrest for cell survival under stress. We also explore whether some of the Whi7 regulatory mechanisms in yeast may have a translation into the transcriptional repressors of the Retinoblastoma family in mammalian cells. I got funding as PI on this topic in both, autonomic and statal Research Projects. During these lasts years as PI, I supervised 1 doctoral Thesis  and I am currently supervising 2 doctoral Theses.