Mikel Lavilla Puerta

Postdoc

My pronouns are He/Him

Contact email: mikel.lavilla@biology.ox.ac.uk

Originally from Spain, I moved to Pisa (Italy) to do my PhD in the Plantlab of the Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna under the supervision of Prof. Beatrice Giuntoli and Pierdomenico Perata. I then moved to Oxford to work inthe Synoxys lab of Prof Francesco Licauso as a PDRA and Co-I. During my research career, I focused on the use of yeast and the synthetic biology motto of "design-build-test-learn" to simplify plants' molecular responses to low oxygen, with a special focus on the Cys N-degron Pathway. My work in the Flashman lab takes up the strategies I designed so far and explores new tools to understand and improve the activity of PCOs as oxygen sensors, always using yeast as a synthetic, orthogonal chassis to quickly test these enzymes, as a primary step before going to plants.