Isabel Gordo, Mónica Bettencourt-Dias and Teresa Teixeira are group leaders at the Instituto Gulbenkian de Ciência. Helder Maiato is at the Instituto de Biologia Molecular e Celular, in Porto, and Bruno Santos Silva is based at the Instituto de Medicina Molecular, in Lisbon. They are all in their 30s, set up their own research groups in Portugal within the last 4-6 years, and except for Teresa Teixeira, are all alumni of the Gulbenkian PhD Programme in Biology and Medicine.
Mónica Bettencourt-Dias, Helder Maiato and Teresa Teixeira are interested in different aspects of the process whereby cells divide. Their findings could have implications for understanding the causes of cancer, age-related syndromes and infertility.
Bettencourt-Dias will be investigating further how the number and architecture of structures called centrioles are regulated in different cells. Centrioles are essential during cell division for the proper separation of chromosomes, and also in motile cells (such as sperm and certain parasites).
Maiato will build on techniques and results already accumulated by his young research group to dissect out the function of yet another crucial keg in the cell division machinery - the kinetochore, which attaches the chromosomes to the protein tracks (microtubules) along which they migrate to the poles of the cell, just before it divides to give two daughter cells.
Teixeira, on the other hand, will be looking into the cellular clock that counts the number of generations. Telomeres are stretches of DNA found at the ends of chromosomes in eukaryotic cells (such as human cells), that shorten with each cell division. With this funding, Teixeira will be able to study individual telomeres, to investigate the impact of structural changes on the capacity of cells to proliferate.
Bruno Silva Santos is an immunologist, and this ERC Grant will be used to identify the molecules and processes underlying the inflammatory responses mediated by T cells of the immune system in response to an infection (by the malaria parasite Plasmodium, for example). His findings may impact on the development of new or more efficient vaccines for chronic infections, such as malaria and tuberculosis.
Isabel Gordo's winning proposal is to provide insight into a pivotal question for evolutionary biologists - the process of adaptation, on which natural selection, and evolution, rest. Gordo will work with populations of the bacteria Escherichia coli, to better understand the biology of bacteria, their diversity, how they evolve and adapt to new environments, namely the selective pressure put on them by the immune system.
The ERC Starting Grants aim to support early career independent researchers (with two to ten years's research experience since completion of their PhD), with a promising scientific track record and proposing to carry out an ambitious and ground-breaking research proposal. The main selection criteria for these, and other, ERC awards is scientific excellence, and all areas of research are covered in the funding scheme. In the previous two rounds, researchers in Portugal secured four Starting grants in the Life Sciences: two in 2008, by researchers at the IMM, and two in 2009 , by researchers at the IGC.
About the new Grantholders:
Mónica Bettencourt Dias, age 37, heads the Cell Cycle Regulation laboratory at the Instituto Gulbenkian de Ciência (IGC), just outside Lisbon. Educated at the University of Lisbon, with a degree in Biochemistry, she received her PhD in cardiac regeneration from University College London (UK). After post-doctoral research at Cambridge University, she moved to the IGC, in 2006, to set up her own research group. She has a post-graduate diploma in Science Communication from Birkbeck College (UK). Her group has published several important papers in the field of cell division and motility, and she has received several prizes and grants, including the Eppendorf Prize, the Pfizer Award, an EMBO Installation Grant, the EMBO Young Investigator Award and, most recently, a grant of the Harvard Medical School-Portugal Programme.
Hélder Maiato, age 34, is the head of the Chromosome Instability and Dynamics laboratory at the Instituto de Biologia Molecular e Celular (IBMC) and a faculty member of the Faculdade de Medicina da Universidade do Porto (Porto). Maiato has a degree in Biochemistry from the University of Porto and a PhD in Biomedical Sciences from the same university, having done most of his doctoral research at the University of Edinburgh (UK). He was a post-doctoral researcher at the Wadsworth Center, Divison of Molecular Medicine, New York State Department of Health (USA) where he applied laser microsurgery techniques to investigate the cell division process. Maiato has over 25 publications in leading scientific journals such as Cell, Nature Cell Biology and The Journal of Cell Biology, has and received several awards and grants, including a Human Frontier Young Investigator Grant.
Teresa Teixeira, 38 years old, was an undergraduate and doctoral student in Paris, France. After receiving her PhD in nuclear organisation and functional genome analysis of Saccharomyces cerevisiae from the Pasteur Institute, she moved to the Institut Suisse de Recherche Expérimentale sur le Cancer, in Lausanne. In 2005 she joined the CNRS in Lyon, with a permanent position. She is setting up her own research group at the Institut de Biologie Physico-Chimique, in Paris, having initially applied for ERC funding through the IGC where Teixeira initially planned to establish herself as an independent group leader.
Bruno Silva-Santos, age 36, is head of the Immunology Unit at the Instituto de Medicina Molecular and a faculty member of the Faculdade de Medicina de Lisboa. He is also an External Researcher of the IGC. Silva-Santos has a degree in Biochemistry from the University of Lisbon, and a PhD in Immunology from University College London (UK). He was a post-doctoral researcher at King's College London (UK), before returning to Portugal, in 2005. He has published in leading scientific journals, such as Nature Immunology, Nature and Science, and received several prizes and grants, including the King's College London Young Researcher of the Year Award, an EMBO Installation Grant, the Pfizer Award for Clinical Research and the International Cytokine Society prize for young researcher.
Isabel Gordo, 37 years old, has a degree in Physics from the Instituto Superior Técnico (Lisbon), a PhD in Evolutionary Biology from the University of Edinburgh (UK). Since 2004 she has been head of the Evolutionary Biology group at the IGC. She has over 25 publications in leading scientific journals, has supervised several PhD students and collaborates with several research groups in Portugal and abroad.