My Research topics

This page is a trip down memory lane and could be the longest read on this website by the time of its deployment. For those of you in a hurry, here is a primer, but feel free to keep reading.

• Genetics, especially those related to the fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster, from basic husbandry genetics to cutting-edge transgenic tools.
• Molecular and cellular biology, including readout items for expression and detection of intracellular proteins.
• Imaging with confocal microscopy and other systems such as Airyscan.
• Image analysis using both manual and automated approaches.

Undergrad and master projects

Looking back, I consider myself quite lucky of acquiring such an amount of early insights into research during the second half of my undergrad years at Universidad Autónoma of Madrid (UAM, Spain). Nowadays.

We dedicated a whole week to dissecting, in pairs, a series of Drosophila strains with different Gal4/UAS combinations, so different neurons in the larva would emit green fluorescent protein upon inspection in the microscope. Another week dealt with the neuromuscular junction, and the last one with the behaviour of the adult flies, ranging from in situ assays of the olfactory response to the analysis of something I was introduced to called “circadian rhythms”.

My

If you reach the bottom of this page, you will realise why my undergrad years are not only the foundation but still some sort of representative sample of my career so far.

PhD project

Postdoctoral projects

I dedicated a good chunk of the winter and spring of my last year as PhD student to job applications for a postdoctoral position. The process was training on itself, with some small ups and considerable downs. But it felt great to secure a job at the University of Sheffield (UK) to work with Dr Natalia Bulgakova early enough to just dedicate that summer to finishing my thesis (and dealing with housing and relocation across England).

Control of E-cadherin dynamics (2017-2021)

My goal was finding regulators of the recycling of membrane-bound E-cadherin, but along the way I found evidences of genetic regulation. This nicely tighted with other projects in the lab and contribute to shed some light in the multifaceted control of E-cad dynamics. And yes, this project was near its final semester when Covid hit, effectively freezing my research for many weeks and forcing a catch-up and project extension.

Regulation of the subapical microtubule network by cell shape and Ft-Ds polarity (2020-2022).

The published work of my first postdoc project (Ramírez Moreno et al., MBoC 2022) obscures a significant amount of work performed with embryos before we deemed the wing disc results more interesting to follow up. It was thanks to being at the right place and time that was offered the chance of performing a series of additional experiments.

The developing wing inside the pupa (so the very same tissue than on the larval wing disc, but some days later) is an excellent model of planar cell polarity, the one that occurs along a plane, gives cues to the cell about what’s “before” or “after” and thus is critical for tissue development and formation of such an intrincated shapes we can find in multicellular living beings.

Propagation of Tau pathology

In my current project since October 2022. Thanks to the interaction with the other lab members, I am also getting insights into the biology of aging, working with Tau protein outside a biological system, and even cutting-edge detection devices to identify tauopathies with minimally invasive tests.