The Microbial Functional Genomics (MFG) Team is integrated in the Centre of Molecular and Environmental Biology (CBMA), a Research Unit hosted at the School of Sciences of University of Minho.
Led by Dr. Pedro Santos, the MFG team is strongly engaged in Systems and Synthetic Biology approaches to enhance the potential of bacterial isolates. High-throughput methodologies have been developed and implemented to characterize biological collections for posterior prediction of biotechnologically useful traits, such as unique metabolic features.
The Team holds a particular interest in:

i) Bacteria belonging to the Pseudomonas genus, which possess an intricate ability to tolerate and thrive in challenging environments such as the Human lungs, the deep sea or highly polluted soils. Such competence resides in their wide nutritional and metabolic versatility and in a complex network of adaptation mechanisms. In other words, the necessary code to efficiently cope with a wide variety of different substrates and biotic and/or abiotic stress conditions is included in their genomic catalog. Therefore, they hold great potential, as a source of novel biomolecules and cell factories, for different biotechnological applications, namely in the fields of biocatalysis, biosensors, bioremediation, and biomedicine.

ii) Characterization and exploitation of marine microbiome diversity and dynamics as biomonitoring and innovative biotech tools.

Our mission:

• Enhance Pseudomonas biotechnological potential resorting to Systems and Synthetic Biology approaches.
• Optimization of Metagenomics characterization of microbiomes to assess bacterial biodiversity in different biological samples, such as soil, water and cetaceans.