Silvia Ramundo

There is ample evidence that cells sense the functional state of chloroplasts. Thus, retrograde signals must travel from the chloroplast to the host nucleus to trigger reprogramming of gene expression. I am very curious to understand, at the mechanistic level, how conditions inside the organelle are sensed, how signals are triggered, how they cross compartmental boundaries, and to what extent they are self-sufficient or integrated with other signalling pathways. To this aim, I am in the process of designing a high-throughput genetic screen in close collaboration with the laboratory of Dr. Martin Jonikas.

I graduated from Bologna University, in Italy, with a degree in Pharmaceutical Biotechnology. I carried out my master thesis project on splicing regulation in the model yeast S. cerevisiae at the Center for Genomic Regulation, in Barcelona, Spain. In summer 2006, I trained in the laboratory of Dr. Jim Umen at the Salk Institute, in San Diego, USA, where I learned about regulation of cell cycle in the green algae C reinhardtii. Later on, I joined the International PhD Program in Life Sciences at the University of Geneva, in Switzerland. As a major achievement of my research studies in the laboratory of Prof. Jean-David Rochaix, I developed a riboswitch-mediated gene expression system. This genetic tool made it possible, for the first time, to achieve a specific, conditional and reversible knock-down of any essential chloroplast gene. Since autumn 2013, I am a postdoctoral scholar at UCSF, in the laboratory of Prof. Peter Walter.