Five young group leaders in Portugal have just joined the prestigious network of recipients of the European Research Council Starting Grants, in what is the largest yield to date for Portuguese researchers in this prestigious and highly competitive funding programme. Each researcher thus ensures funding on the order of 1-1.5 million euro, for a period of five years, which will allow them to further unravel processes and molecules underlying the division, movement and ageing of cells, inflammatory responses to disease and adaptation of bacteria to the environment.
Isabel Gordo, Mónica Bettencourt-Dias and Teresa Teixeira are group leaders at the Instituto Gulbenkian de Ciência, just outside Lisbon. 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' 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.