Dra. Jana Alonso

  • IPNA-CSIC / Laboratorio de Agrobiología de La Palma (Canary Islands, Spain)

Expert in proteomics and mass spectrometry (MS), she obtained her Biology degree and PhD in Molecular Biology and Biochemistry at the Autonomous University of Madrid. Her thesis in “Proteomics in Drosophila melanogaster” was supervised by the Professor Juan Fernández Santarén at the Molecular Biology Center “Severo Ochoa” (CSIC-UAM).

In 2008, Dr. Alonso was appointed head of the Proteomics Unit at the Health Research Institute of Santiago (IDIS), where she was involved in several research projects in basic and translational research. After five years, she joined Professor Daan van Aalten’s group (University of Dundee, UK), where she had the opportunity of applying her experience in MS to map the O-GlcNAc post-translational modification in proteins. In fact, she was able to decipher the “peptide sequon” of the O-GlcNAc transferase. In 2014, she joined the group of Dr. Alberto Baena-Lopez (University of Oxford), to explore the role of caspases in non-apoptotic situations. Applying CRISPR/Cas-9 and proteomics, she identified potential substrates and regulators of these “molecular scissors”.

Since 2018, Dr. Alonso is part of the Soil Fertility and Plant Nutrition group, being her goal to apply biochemistry, proteomics and mass spectrometry to the field of agrobiology. Currently, her efforts are focused on the study of subtropical fruit crops from the physicochemical and proteomic points of view; and on the genetic typification and biochemical characterisation of the local species of hot and sweet pepper.

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