Dr Bernardino de la Serna holds two Master Degrees, one in Chemistry and another in Biochemistry (from University Complutense of Madrid (Spain). He was awarded his PhD at the working in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology under the supervision of Prof. Perez-Gil. 

He carried out his postdoctoral training at the Center for BioMembrane Physics (MEMPHYS) at the University of Southern Denmark. In 2014 Jorge was awarded Marie Skłodowska-Curie Career Integration Fellowship and moved to the University of Oxford (United Kingdom). There he was based at the MRC-Weatherall Institute of Molecular Medicine, Nuffield Department of Medicine, in the group of Prof. Christian Eggeling. During this time he got interested in super resolution imaging and undertook additional training in super-resolution fluorescence microscopy at the lab of Nobel Prize Laureate Prof. Stephan Hell at the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry, Göttingen (Germany). Thereafter, he moved to the Oxford-Harwell Campus to undertake a new role of a Staff Scientist at the United Kingdom Research and Innovation (UKRI), working at the Central Laser Facility at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory. In 2019 Jorge joined the National Heart and Lung Institute, Imperial College London (United Kingdom) as a Senior Lecturer. His academic career also includes additional research stays, e.g. fellowship at the Humboldt University in Berlin and stays at the University of California at Santa Barbara, Venezuelan Institute for Scientific Investigations (IVIC) in Caracas Venezuela, SENAI/CETIQT in Rio de Janeiro, Brazila and Umeå University in Sweden.

Jorge’s interests include research on molecular sensing and remodeling in the airways,  interactions between host cell and toxic pollutants, nanoparticles and pathogens, engineered nanoparticles as drug delivery systems, organ-on-a-chip models and advanced imaging techniques, incl. super-resolution (STED) fluorescence microscopy.

Sergey Samsonov graduated in Biophysics at Peter the Great St. Petersburg Polytechnic University in 2006. He obtained his first PhD in 2009 in Bioinformatics at the Dresden University of Technology, where he investigated the impact of solvent and effects of fluorination in protein-protein interactions. In 2010 he obtained his second PhD title in the field of Biochemistry at St. Petersburg University for the continuation of his Master Thesis topic on copper metabolism proteins. Since then and until 2017 he was a postdoctoral researcher in the group of Structural Bioinformatics at Dresden University of Technology within the project “Transregio 67: Functional biomaterials for controlling healing processes in bone and skin tissue – from material to clinic”, where he started to work in the field of modelling glycosaminoglycans (GAG) containing biomolecular systems. In 2017 he received a joint grant from National Centre of Sciences (Poland) and EU Commission within POLONEZ Programme to start his own research group at the University of Gdańsk. In 2018 he obtained the title of dr hab. at the University of Tours (France) (Habilitation à diriger des recherches). In 2019, he received two new grants from National Centre of Sciences (Poland), one of which is within collaborative Programme with German Research Council, both of which represent the extension of his GAG modeling studies. His research interests are in approaching the understanding of various aspects of GAG interactions with other biomacromolecules and development of specific methodology for this class of polysaccharides with the assistance of molecular docking, molecular dynamics, free energy calculations and quantum chemistry approaches.

Dr Wojciech Siwek graduated from the University of Warsaw. He did his PhD at the International Institute of Molecular and Cell Biology, Warsaw followed by two postdocs at Instituto Gulbenkian de Ciência, Lisbon, Portugal & Department of Biochemistry, University of Oxford, UK. Currently, he is an independent Marie Skłodowska-Curie research fellow at Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, USA & International Centre for Cancer Vaccine Science, University of Gdańsk. Dr Siwek is interested in epigenetic mechanisms in innate immunity and transcriptional memory.

Bio: Alessio Mengoni graduated in biological sciences in 1997 and obtained a PhD in genetics from the University of Pavia in 2000. He is associate professor of Genetics, qualified as full professor, at the Department of Biology of the University of Florence and has been visiting professor at the Intercollegiate Faculty of Biotechnology MUIG & GU, Gdansk, Poland and at the School of Sun-Yat Sen University, Guangzhou, China. He holds courses in genetics, genetic engineering, genomics and systems biology in the degree programs in Biotechnology and Biology. Main research interests deal with the study of interactions between plants and microorganisms, in particular related to plant growth-promoting bacteria and plant microbiome for applications in agricultural and environmental biotechnology. He is the author of over 170 scientific articles, a patent and founding partner of a spin-off company of the University of Florence for microbiological and genetic analysis (EcolGene Srl). Bibliometric indices: h index = 37, 4105 total citations (Scopus database, October 2021). He has been PI and partner in the last 5 years of various national and international projects, including a Italian Ministry of Agriculture funded project on bioinoculants (MICRO4Legumes), a project on microbial genomic diversity of the National Research Plan in Antarctica (ANTreN), a soil metagenomics project (METATRACK, CR Firenze Foundation), a project on the microbiome of patients affected by Cystic Fibrosis (Italian Cystic Fibrosis Research Foundation), and two H2020 projects on plant bioinoculants (SIMBA) and International Space Station microbiota (BIOWYSE).

Abstract . Mutualistic interactions have great importance in biology and are key to either macro- and micro-ecosystems functioning, from biogeochemical cycles to the animal and plant microbiome. Many studies have been performed to investigate the molecular aspects of mutualism, however, the genetic repertoire needed for efficient association with host by the microbial symbionts is still poorly understood. Several studies highlighted that the expression of the desired phenotype in the host resides in species-specific, even genotype-specific interactions between the symbiotic partners. Consequently, there is a need to dissect such an intimate level of interaction, aiming to identify the main genetic components in both partners playing a role in symbiotic differences/host preferences [1]. The rhizobia are an exemplary model of microbial mutualist. They are facultative mutualist partners of leguminous plants, with which they establish nitrogen-fixing symbioses.
By applying complementary approaches spanning from computational reconstruction of metabolic interactions to transcriptomic and comparative genomic analyses, we dissected genotype-by-genotype interactions in the model symbiotic partnership between the rhizobium Sinorhizobium meliloti and the host plant (Medicago spp.).
Results from integrated rhizobium-plant genome-scale metabolic model [2], genome-wide association [3] and comparative transcriptomic analyses [4] of late and early stages of symbiosis will be presented and discussed in the light of explaining and exploiting the large genomic diversity rhizobial symbiont populations in the perspective of improving microbial inoculants formulations in sustainable agriculture practices.