Seminario | “How fungi will save us from the climate change apocalypse”

Seminario externo que tendrá lugar en la Fundación MEDINA, con la participación del Dr. Pablo Cruz-Morales, investigador senior y group leader en el Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Biosustainability (Lyngby, Dinamarca), quien impartirá una charla titulada “How fungi will save us from the climate change apocalypse”.

El Dr. Pablo Cruz-Morales utiliza sus conocimientos en evolución para acelerar el descubrimiento y facilitar la producción de productos naturales y otros químicos, dando lugar a productos y procesos que mejoraran la salud humana a través de una química verde y sostenible.

Abstract:

For about 150 years industrial chemistry has revolved around petroleum. Our transportation, food, and health are dangerously linked to this non-renewable resource that will be depleted in about 50 years. The world urgently needs new chemical processes that can support us sustainably.

Fungi are extraordinary chemists; they make molecules for competition, attack, defense, communication, deception, energy-storage, and structure-building. We study fungal chemistry to learn how to use it to make polymers, drugs, agrochemicals, fuels for aviation, rocketry, and shipping,

Our work involves collecting and cultivating fungi, usually complex species with limited knowledge available. We look at the natural chemicals they produce, and decode the chemical recipes stored in their DNA. We then transfer the DNA-written recipes to simpler, laboratory-friendly fungi who can then make the chemicals.  We modify the recipes to create variants of the natural chemicals, iterating this process until we get molecules suitable for human needs.

In this talk I will present our fungal chemical discovery and engineering platform and some of their potential applications.

• Fecha: jueves 3 de abril de 2025
• Lugar: Salón de Actos, Fundación MEDINA, PTS Granada
• Horario: 12:00 – 13:00
• Organiza: Fundación MEDINA
• Más información: info@medinaandalucia.es