Engineering Microbial-based Platforms for Natural Product Innovation

In this presentation I will introduce myself and the ActinoXpress project – the catalyst for my recent move to CIIMAR and, hopefully, a platform to spark future interdisciplinary collaborations. ActinoXpress brings together my long-standing interest in bacterial secondary metabolism with the expertise in implementing synthetic biology concepts for the development of molecular tools. Recently, we have made significant efforts in the development of Actinobacteria-based expression hosts leading to the generation of a microbial platform for the heterologous expression of NP. The ActinoXpress builds on our recent work and combines synthetic biology principles and knowledge-based metabolic engineering to develop new molecular tools. These tools will accelerate the heterologous expression of BGCs as an enabling technology.

Marta V. Mendes (CIIMAR)

Marta V. Mendes obtained her PhD degree in Biology from the University of León (Spain) in 2003. After a postdoctoral period in France she returned to Portugal in 2005 and joined IBMC, first as Postdoctoral research fellow and then as a research associate. Since then, she has been able to secure competitive funding as principal investigator, and establish an independent research team focused on the molecular networks governing secondary metabolism in Streptomyces. In 2025 she joined CIIMAR.

In case of any questions, please contact CIIMAR’s Seminar team, Marta Monteiro, Miguel Semedo, & Paulo Oliveira, at seminars@ciimar.up.pt

External members of CIIMAR should send an email to slopes@ciimar.up.pt, requesting authorization to enter the Porto Cruise Terminal area

CIIMAR members can also access last seminars recordings through the LINK.