Montserrat Corominas i Guiu graduated in Biological Sciences at the University of Barcelona (UB) in 1981. She next worked at the Department of Physiology of the UB Medical School on the role of ADP-ribosylation in differentiation of the spermatogenic germ line and received her PhD in Biology in 1986. Sponsored by a fellowship from the Spanish Ministry of Education and Science she joined the Department of Pathology at NYU Medical Center in New York in 1987 as a post-doctoral fellow to work on ras mutations in cancer. Later, she moved to the Division of Toxicology at MIT in Boston to study the role of fos and trk oncogenes. She returned to Barcelona in 1992 with a position as Associate Professor in the Department of Genetics at the UB. Her research of the last years has focused on the cellular and molecular mechanisms underlying development and regeneration in Drosophila. She teaches undergraduate and master courses and has directed 10 PhD theses.

Research interests

Successful development and regeneration processes demand a hierarchal and well- controlled balance between proliferation, differentiation and metabolic functions, which are mostly orchestrated by signaling molecules and transcriptional regulation. Although similar gene networks participate in both, development and regeneration, there are important differences in the intensity of the signals or the levels of transcription. The ultimate goal of our research group is to understand how transcription is regulated during development and regeneration using Drosophila larval imaginal discs, epithelia that generate adult structures, as a model system. In particular, we want to elucidate how transcription factors drive gene expression programs through interaction with genomic elements, such as enhancers, and how chromatin modifications (mainly histone modifications) contribute to gene expression changes during development and regeneration.

Keywords

Development, regeneration, transcription, chromatin,