Miguel Angel Blazquez

Miguel Ángel Blázquez has been the principal investigator at the Institute for Plant Molecular and Cellular Biology in Valencia since 2001, when he joined as a Tenured Scientist at the CSIC. He studied Chemistry at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid and obtained his PhD in Biochemistry in 1995 for his work on a new mechanism of glycolysis regulation in yeast, which later led to improvements in industrial fermentation processes. As a postdoc, he worked at the Plant Biology Lab of the Salk Institute in San Diego (California), where he studied the interaction between hormones and light in the control of flowering time under the supervision of Prof. Detlef Weigel. In 2003, he was recognized as an EMBO Young Investigator. Currently, the work in his laboratory focuses on elucidating the architecture and evolution of signaling circuits that control early plant development and how plants integrate multiple signals to execute the most appropriate developmental program in each situation.

Hernández-García, J.*, Serrano-Mislata, A., Lozano-Quiles, M., Úrbez, C., Nohales, M.A. Blanco-Touriñán, N., Peng, H., Ledesma-Amaro, R., Blázquez, M.A.* (2024) DELLA proteins recruit the Mediator complex subunit MED15 to co-activate transcription in land plants.
Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA. 121: e2319163121.

Briones-Moreno A, Hernández-García J, Vargas-Chávez C, Blanco-Touriñán N, Phokas A, Úrbez C, Cerdán PD, Coates JC, Alabadí D, Blázquez MA.* (2023) DELLA functions evolved by rewiring of associated transcriptional networks. Nat. Plants  9, 535-543.

Hernández-García J, Sun R, Serrano-Mislata A, Inoue K, Vargas-Chávez C, Esteve-Bruna D, Arbona V, Yamaoka S, Nishihama R, Kohchi T*, Blázquez MA.* (2021) Coordination between growth and stress responses by DELLA in Marchantia polymorpha. Curr. Biol. 31, 3678-3686.

Hernández-García J, Briones-Moreno A, Dumas R, Blazquez MA.* (2019) Origin of gibberellin-dependent transcriptional regulation by molecular exploitation of a transactivation domain in DELLA proteins. Mol. Biol. Evol. 36, 908-918.

Abbas M, Hernández-García J, Pollmann S, Samodelov SL, Kolb M, Friml J, Hammes UZ, Zurbriggen MD, Blázquez MA*, Alabadí D (2018) Auxin methylation is required for differential growth in Arabidopsis Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 115, 6864-6869.

Abbas M, Berckhan S, Rooney D, Gibbs DJ, Vicente-Conde J, Marín-de la Rosa NA, Sousa-Correia C, Bassel GW, León J, Alabadí D, Blázquez MA*, Holdsworth, MJ.* (2015) Oxygen sensing coordinates photomorphogenesis to facilitate seedling survival. Curr. Biol. 25, 1483-1488.

Vera-Sirera F, De Rybel B, Úrbez C, Kouklas E, Pesquera M, Álvarez-Mahecha JC, Minguet EG, Tuominen H, Carbonell J, Borst JW, Weijers D*, Blázquez MA.* (2015) A bHLH-based feedback loop that restricts vascular cell proliferation in plants Dev. Cell 35, 432-443.

Locascio A, Blázquez MA*, Alabadí D. (2013) Dynamic regulation of cortical microtubule organization through prefoldin-DELLA interaction Curr. Biol. 23, 804-809.

Gallego-Bartolomé J, Minguet EG, Grau-Enguix F, Abbas M, Locascio A, Thomas SG, Alabadí D, Blázquez MA. (2012) Molecular mechanism for the interaction between brassinosteroid and gibberellin signaling pathways in Arabidopsis Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA109, 13446-13451.

Blázquez MA, Ahn JH, Weigel D. (2003) A thermosensory pathway controlling flowering time in Arabidopsis thaliana. Nat. Genet. 33, 168-171.

Blázquez MA, Weigel, D. (2000) Integration of floral inductive signals in Arabidopsis Nature 404, 889-892.