Dr. Marco Trujillo. RWTH Aachen University (Germany)
“Protein homeostasis networks – challenges and opportunities for stressed plants”
Protein homeostasis pathways and the ubiquitin-modification system are key drivers of plant resilience. We are interested in understanding the crosstalk between various cellular signalling pathways and ubiquitin signalling during stress. Moreover, we aim to elucidate how different ubiquitin signals arising from structurally and functionally different ubiquitin polymers modulate processes such as endocytosis and secretion. Please find attached a recent paper.
Short bio
Marco is a Heisenberg Professor at the RWTH Aachen University and holds the chair of the Institute for Molecular Plant Physiology . He studied microbiology at the University of Los Andes in Colombia and obtained a stipend during his Master to go to the University of Giessen, where he studied the interaction between cereals and powdery mildews fungi. During his PhD he focused on the function of NADPH oxidases and the role of reactive oxygen species during the immune response. He then moved to the Sainsbury Laboratory in the U.K. where he switched to the model plant Arabidopsis to analyze ubiquitin signalling in Ken Shirasu’s Lab. After becoming an Alexander von Humboldt/JSPS fellow, Marco moved again overseas to the RIKEN Institute in Yokohama, Japan. He started his own group at the University of Würzburg where he became an assistant professor, and was later selected for the independent junior group leader position at the Leibniz Institute of Plant Biochemistry in Halle (Saale). While being an interim Professor at the University of Freiburg he was accepted to the Heisenberg programme of the DFG.