LIFE-AT-ARMs | Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology

Research Interests in Brief

Our ultimate goal is to understand how living organisms function. With this aim we work on cell function as well as cell control using many different cutting-edge molecular biology techniques.

Every cell in the body of a multicellular organism has all the information to create a clone of the same organism. They have all the instructions such as growing, migrating and dividing, yet, instead cells organise and differentiate into all the different cell types, forming tissues, in our bodies. This means that cells follow a programme where some of their activities are repressed while others are activated. How cells communicate with each other and make decisions on what each cell will become is something we are just starting to understand. Moreover, cells “remember” such instructions and can pass the information to the next generation of cells when they divide.

Our group’s research focus in the understanding of how cells make decisions at the molecular level, and more importantly how we can manipulate the key players: proteins and RNA, in a way that we can control the activity and fate of cells. In other words, we do not only want to understand the molecular mechanisms but we would like to be able to programme cells and in some cases change their fate, for example stopping cancer cells from migrating.

Cells are extremely complex and the networks of interactions within cells is overwhelming. Thus, we use cutting-edge molecular biology techniques to be able to manipulate cells at all levels (DNA, RNA, Protein) and modern synthetic biology tools such as proteins that get activated or inactivated by light, RNA that acts as scaffold for protein complexes, or riboprotein complexes that are able to delete, replace or repair genes in cells.

As working with biological systems has many challenges, we also work in the development or improvement of molecular tools in order to study complex phenomena.

Our work is performed in vitro and in vivo using animal models.