Rafael Giraldo (Centro de Investigaciones Biológicas – CSIC, Madrid, Spain)
Speaker: Rafael Giraldo (Centro de Investigaciones Biológicas – CSIC, Madrid, Spain)
Talk: Synthetic Biology: News ways and tools to engineer biological systems
Time: Thursday, 2nd July 2015, 10:00
Venue: Biotechnology Summer School 2015, Kadyny Folwark Hotel&SPA
Category: Invited lectures during Biotechnology Summer School
Rafael Giraldo, biographical note
Rafael got a Ph. D. Biol. Sci. in 1991 (Complutense U., Madrid) on the genetics and biochemistry of plasmid DNA replication initiation, under the supervision of R. Díaz-Orejas (CIB-CSIC). Then, he spent a postdoctoral (1992-94) in the group of D. Rhodes at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology (Cambridge, UK), where he studied the role of the yeast Rap1 protein in packing telomeric dsDNA, which led to the crystal structure of the first telomeric nucleoprotein complex. Rafael also found that Rap1 promoted the assembly of parallel DNA quadruplexes by the G-rich strand of yeast telomeres, an early example of a protein chaperoning a DNA structure. Back to CIB-CSIC, first as a postdoctoral (1995-1999) and since then as staff scientist, his main focus was on how sequence-specific DNA binding elicits conformational changes in the winged-helix (WH) domains of plasmid-encoded bacterial replication (Rep) proteins. Besides this, he studied the assembly of yeast ORC initiator. In 2007, Rafael found the way to tailor WH domains to become DNA-modulated amyloidogenic devices, having recently developed synthetic prion-like modules recapitulating essential features of mammalian amyloid proteinopathies (e.g.: toxicity, modulation by chaperones of conformational strains), albeit confined to a bio-safe bacterial host. Since 2010, he is a CSIC Research Professor and a member of Academia Europaea. In 2015, he has been elected as Vice-President of the Spanish Society for Microbiology (SEM).