oriol.gallego@upf.edu
Dr Oriol Gallego is a tenure-track group leader at the MELIS department of UPF, leading the Live-cell structural biology Group in the interface between cell and structural biology. His research focuses on the development of new imaging and image analysis approaches that allow a quantitative understanding of the spatial and temporal organization of the protein machinery that controls cell growth. Oriol did a postdoc at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Heidelberg, Germany, under the supervision of Anne-Claude Gavin and Marko Kaksonen. In his postdoc Oriol established a lipid-binding assay for high-throughput screening of protein-lipid interactions and a light microscopy technique to investigate the structure of protein complexes directly in living cells. Already as a Ramón y Cajal researcher at the Institute for Research in Biomedicine at Barcelona (IRB), Spain, he solved the architecture of the exocyst complex bound to a secretory vesicle in yeast, a work that provided unprecedented understanding of the mechanism that controls vesicle tethering in exocytosis. Currently the group of Oriol Gallego has a particular interest for the molecular mechanisms that control exocytosis as a paradigm of a complex and dynamic cellular process that controls the growth of eukaryotic cells. His group combines advanced microscopy (SMLM, particle tracking, PICT and cryo-ET), biochemistry, proteomics and integrative modelling to generate quantitative models of the molecular mechanism that regulates exocytosis. The implementation of unconventional model organisms allowed them to embark on the field of evolutionary cell biology with the aim of understanding the molecular principles that underlie eukaryotes adaptation to different ecological niches