Pelaz Herrero, Soraya

Biography

Born in Bilbao, started Biology studies in the Basque Country University but moved to Madrid to follow the Molecular Biology and Biochemistry specialty. She obtained her BSc at Autonomous University of Madrid (UAM) in 1989. For her PhD studies she joined Dr. Morata's laboratory at the CBM where she performed research on Developmental Genetics working with Drosophila with a Basque Predoctoral fellowship and got the PhD in 1993 at UAM. For her postdoctoral research she moved from flies to flowers by joining Dr. Yanofsky's laboratory at the University of California at San Diego. There she performed Developmental Biology on Arabidopsis with fellowships from the Spanish Ministry of Education and Science and from the Human Frontiers Science Program Organization. In 2001 she got a "Ramón y Cajal" contract at INIA in Madrid to establish her own line of research in Flower Development. In 2003 she joined ICREA and moved to Barcelona.

Research Interest

Floral induction is probably the most important process in plant development since it takes to the formation of flowers and fruits. Flowering must happen in a favorable time of the year to allow successful seed formation and reproduction. Our goal is to elucidate how plants know when to flower in response to a variety of external and endogenous signals and what genes are responsible for the flower development itself. Flowers are composed of four types of organs: sepals, petals, stamens and pistils, whose differentiation is the result of the coordinated action of different genes. Unraveling the intimate mechanisms governing these events became our main interest. As a consequence of our studies in plant development we lately focused on trichomes (plant hairs) as putative biofactories for anticancer and antimalarial compounds. We will generate hairy plants of species known for their anticancer properties with new compounds inside their trichomes to improve anticancer treatments.