Daniel Conde, CBGP (UPM-INIA/CSIC) researcher, receives a Junior Leader Incoming Grant from the la Caixa foundation

Daniel Conde, a researcher from the Centre for Plant Biotechnology and Genomics (CBGP, UPM-INIA/CSIC), receives a prestigious La Caixa Junior Leader fellowship to develop his project which seeks the Identification of the molecular regulatory mechanisms of the meristem cells differentiation during the formation of new organs in trees, by applying single-cell transcriptomics.

The Postdoctoral Junior Leader Fellowships programme aims at recruiting excellent researchers to develop projects in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) and to promote high quality, innovative research in Spain and Portugal while supporting the best scientific talents who are offered an attractive and competitive environment in which to carry out at research centers of accredited excellence.

Daniel Conde is among the 25 researchers awarded in 2022 and received three hundred thousand euros (300,000 €) to support the development of his project. He says, “This funding will help to consolidate my research skills by allowing the execution of a scientific project, and to test my potential as an independent researcher which is the main goal of this call”.

One of the goals of his project is to discover the basic biological principles of cell differentiation during post-embryonic development in woody species, by applying new technologies developed by him to dissect populations of heterogeneous cells and characterize their transcriptomes in trees. New regulatory mechanisms of the formation of differentiated tissues, such as secondary vasculature, will be identified by modeling cell lineages or developmental trajectories. These discoveries will allow hypotheses about how the formation of the organs and tissues adapts to environmental, biotic, or abiotic changes, in the context of a changing climate. These new mechanisms will be validated in functional studies.

You are welcome to learn more about Daniel´s research here.

About Daniel Conde

Daniel finished his Ph.D. in 2017, where he assessed the influence of chromatin remodeling during the growth-dormancy periods in poplar trees at the CBGP under the supervision of Dr. Isabel Allona and Dr. Pablo González-Melendi. Then he moved for a postdoctoral stage to the lab of Dr. Matias Kirst at the University of Florida. He first joined a project focused on identifying regulatory genes of wood development and found a novel gene that controls wood vessel element size and a master regulator of lignin formation. In late 2017, the US Department of Energy awarded Kirst's group a grant to engineer bioenergy crops to fix nitrogen. While Kirst's group was the project leader, it also involved other research groups. He was assigned as project coordinator. In January 2022, he joined the CBGP with a María Zambrano 3-years grant, "Contratos atracción de Talento Internacional".