Ana Figueiredo awarded in the 3rd edition of the SymbNET PhD Project Award
Ana Figueiredo, a PhD student from the Inflammation Lab at Instituto Gulbenkian de Ciência (FCG-IGC), is the awardee of the 3rd call of the SymbNET PhD Project Award. This award funds the best collaborative research project in the context of SymbNET, aiming to promote collaborative research in Host-Microbe Symbiosis, Genomics, Metabolomics and Proteomics. The prize (4,000€) to be spent with research reagents additionally covers a visit of one month to the collaborator’s Lab.
Ana will develop the project “Non-Canonical Resistance Mechanism Against Malaria: Thermal Proteome Profiling of Plasmodium Parasites” in collaboration with Mikhail Savitski, a Group Leader at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) and head of the Proteomics core facility at that Institute. The student says, “This award will foster the development of my project, giving me the opportunity to collaborate with EMBL, to perform advanced thermal proteome profiling with Dr Mikhail Savitski’s group. With this technique, we aim to generate a deeper molecular understanding of how a host-generated metabolite can fight infection by Plasmodium spp., the causative agent of malaria, and bears the potential to impact future anti-malarial therapies.” This project is being developed with Rui Martins, a postdoc in the Inflammation Lab, led by Miguel Soares. In Miguel’s words, “We are very pleased by this outcome, moreover for the opportunity to pursue this project in collaboration with our colleagues at EMBL.”
The initiative will foster collaboration between two institutions involved in the SymbNET consortium, the EMBL (Germany) and FCG-IGC (Portugal).