Caño-Delgado, Ana I.

Ana I. Caño-Delgado´s Lab is a CRAG Investigator internationally recognised for her research on the Brassinosteroid (BR) hormone signaling pathway, that accounts for plant growth and adaptation to climate stress, especially drought. Her laboratory implemented a developmental perspective to study BRs with an spatiotemporal resolution, uncovered new concepts in field, identified novel pathways and hypotheses that are at the leading edge of the research field globally. Her long-time efforts to implement system biological approaches for the study of plant development in collaboration with physicists and computational scientists have flourished on a more realistic understanding on the genetic networks that control vascular and stem cell signaling in plants (Lehner et al., JXB 2016; Lozano et al., J. Cell Science, 2017; Pavelescu et al.,Mol Sys Bio., 2018, Betegón et al., Plant Journal 2019, Planas-Riverola et al., Development 2019, Betegón et al., MolSys Bio 2021, see CV). Furthermore, her lab has delved on the evolutionary origin of plant steroids using the bryophyte model Marchantia (Ferreira et al., Curr.Opp.PlantBio. 2020, Mecchia et al., Current Biology 2021, Ferreira et al. PCP in press 2024).Her team leads translational research towards the production of climate resilient crops (funded by two ERC Grants, see CV). An important milestone was reached by producing plants resistance to drought without impairing growth (Fabregas et al., Nature Comms. 2018; Lozano-Elena et al., Scientific data, 2022, Gupta et al., Current Biol., 2nd rev), having important applications in the fields of agriculture and food security (Gupta et al., Science 2020). Her lab untapped a novel mechanism for enhancing plant resilient to climate change (EU Patent application P6100130EP). These findings are at the base for the foundation of PLANet Biotech

in 2023, the first start up at CRAG for the identification of bioactive compounds to reduced crop loses caused by climate change.