I am a postdoctoral researcher in André Mateus' group at the Department of Chemistry. My research focuses on the functional characterization of Archaea present in the microbiome using proteomics.
I earned my PhD in Molecular Biology at Umeå University, where I focused on the biosynthesis and remodeling of the cell wall in the pathogen Acinetobacter baumannii. After this, I started my postdoc in André Mateus lab, changing from Bacteria to Archaea.
My research aims to characterize the proteome of the Archaeal human microbiome, using a systems biology approach based on chemical perturbation proteomics. Archaeal species are quite uncharacterized and their role in health and disease is still unclear. However, it is known that some species elicit specific host immune responses, or play important metabolic roles such as the degradation of toxic bacterial metabolites. This strongly suggests that Archaea might play a key role in physiological functions yet to be characterized.
Given that some representative archaeal species can be isolated and cultured, this makes them an ideal candidate for systems biology approaches such as proteomics. By perturbing the levels of all expressed proteins (e.g. in the presence of different drugs) and measuring their levels on each condition, we aim to reveal the mechanisms of said perturbation and identify the cellular processes affected. This allows us to map which proteins are likely to have related functions or are interacting since these tend to have their levels coordinated across multiple conditions to maintain stoichiometry of protein complexes pathways.