Professor Paula Gonçalves
University of Lisbon, Portugal
Biography
Paula Gonçalves graduated at NOVA University Lisbon and got her PhD in yeast molecular biology at the VU Amsterdam. After a decade in the Netherlands, she returned to NOVA University to study various subjects related to sugar transport, Saccharomyces ecology and evolution and sexual reproduction in basidiomycetes. Since a decade ago, she has led the study of the evolution of metabolism in a fascinating clade composed mainly of fructophilic yeast species, which profoundly remodelled their metabolism using inter and intra-domain horizontal gene transfers, after a massive gene loss event. This included the loss and re-construction of the alcoholic fermentation pathway using bacterial genes. As a plenary speaker at ECFG17 she will address the latest developments in this topic.