Pablo Rivera Fuentes awarded a SNSF Eccellenza Grant
Pablo Rivera Fuentes is, since August 2019, a Tenure-Track Assistant Professor of chemical biology at the Laboratory of Chemical and Biological Probes (LOCBP) of EPFL. His main interests are focused on the development of targeted photoactivatable probes, on fluorescent sensing of epigenetic modifications and on the development of photoswitchable dyes for high-resolution imaging.
Awarded project
“Chemical probes to control redox biology with subcellular precision”
The chemical environment of subcellular compartments largely defines the biological processes that occur in eukaryotic cells. Indirect observations suggest that shifts in these chemical equilibria induce pathologies, but the molecular mechanisms of how these changes affect physiology remain largely unknown.
The project aims to study, through probes with various activation modes, the induced acute or sustained reductive stress in three important organelles:
- the mitochondria,
- the endoplasmic reticulum,
- and the Golgi apparatus.
It is hoped that these studies will provide a comprehensive picture of cellular reductive stress at an unprecedented level of spatial and chemical specificity, with potential applications in the development of new therapies for diseases associated with disruption of redox homeostasis.
SNSF Eccellenza Grants
The Eccellenza Grants are awarded every year by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) to support outstanding projects by recently appointed tenure-track assistant professors at a Swiss higher education institution. The funds can run for up to five years.