Dra. María De Lourdes Girard Cuesy Secr

Biography

B.A. in Biology at the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana-Iztapalapa, México. M.S. and Ph.D in Basic Biomedical Research at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM), México. Professor (researcher) at the Centro de Ciencias Genómicas (CCG) UNAM for 18 years. She performs research within the field of Molecular Genetics in bacteria, focusing primarily on nitrogen-fixing bacteria known as rhizobia, that establish symbiosis with legume plants. She contributed to the establishment of the physical map of the symbiotic plasmid of Rhizobium etli CFN42 and to the analysis of its transcriptional activity. These were pioneer works in the rhizobiology area that lead to the structural and functional characterization of a complete replicon before the genomics era. Her main contributions are within the transcriptional regulation and the analysis of the functional networks that are essential to control biological nitrogen fixation in response of environmental stimuli such as oxygen and abiotic stresses. Her research combines genetics, molecular biology and genomic approaches; she has elucidated complex regulatory networks and their components, mainly from R. etli (the bean symbiont), thus contributing to understand what makes this bacteria different and particular from other bacteria of its kind. Recently, she expanded her interests to the global study of transcriptional expression, both bacterial and plant, using R. etli strains that confer advantages to the Rhizobium-bean symbiosis. Dra. Girard’s research group maintains successful academic collaborations with the majority of CCG’s research groups and with other groups from Mexico and abroad. Her work has been supported by different national research grants (DGAPA-PAPIIT and CONACYT) as well as academic exchange agreements with foreign countries. She has directed the thesis research work of undergraduate and graduate students, as well as advised research projects of international Postdoctoral fellows.

Research Interest

Genetics