Clara Moreno Fenoll

I completed my MsC and PhD at the National Biotechnology Centre of the Spanish National Research Council in Madrid, where I joined the Systems Biology Programme. I started my research career doing computational biology, but later became an avid experimentalist. During my MsC I used models of microbial metabolisms to study how epistatic interactions betwen genes reflect the underlying molecular complexity. For my PhD I switched gears and explored the impact of feedbacks between evolution and ecology on the fate of microbial communities. I specifically used an engineered minimal community where bacteria interact via a shared molecule, thus connecting gene frequency and population size through cycles of collapse and recovery. The paper can be found here.  Over the course of this project I became particularly intrigued by the role of extracellular products in bacterial populations. Now in my first postdoc, I continue working in this topic, focusing on the iron-scavening molecule pyoverdin produced by Pseudomonas spp. By applying single-cell quantitative techniques, including time-lapse microscopy and microfluidics, I’m trying to understand the ecological implications of changes in the distribution of pyoverdin at the subcellular level.