Many congratulations to Irene, Lucía and Adrián, who have all concluded their projects and defended their BSc and MSc theses, respectively. Best luck for all in your future endeavours!

CIMUS and our group welcome the summer students Irene, Sergio and Desiree, who have been generously funded by the AECC Summer Fellowships program to introduce them for two months to research carried out in the lab. Thanks AECC for their great support of basic science and fostering scientific vocations.

Miguel presents some of the lab last results as the 256th speaker of Social DNAing, the weekly DNA Dynamics Webinar Series, sponsored by the Cancer Genomics and Epigenomics Program of the Herbert Irving Comprehensive Cancer Center at Columbia University seminar series. Thanks to the host, Dr. Alberto Ciccia, and the rest of the organizers for the invitation. 

María and Miguel attended the 2nd Recombination Mechanisms Conference in Chania, Crete with a poster presentation. A great opportunity to catch up with the best science in the field, collaborators and friends in a very picturesque location.

Miguel delivers a guest seminar at the Max Perutz Laboratories in Vienna, hosted by Dr. Joao Matos. Very insightful feedback and interactions with various PIs and students. Thanks for a great welcome in a spectacular institute and city.

Our lab participates in the 14th Meeting of Spanish Yeast Netwok held at The Escorial (December 11-13th) with a talk from Miguel. A fantastic, low-cost gathering with amazing science and even better atmosphere.  

The lab welcomes the Biotechnology students Irene Anta Pérez and Lucía Rodríguez Frade, who will be carrying out their BSc thesis in our group. Also, Adrián Caride Armada (Master in Biomedical Research) will develop his MSc thesis project with us this course. Best luck to all of you!

Congratulations to Laura, Beatriz and Manuel, who have all brilliantly defended their BSc theses. Moreover, also kudos to Clara, who after completing her MSc thesis with top marks, will continue in the lab as a PhD student in the Molecular Medicine program.

Today is a special day for the lab. The current issue of Nucleic Acids Research features two papers from the group reflecting the PhD projects of Tomás Lama Díaz and Raquel Carreira Rodríguez.

In Alternative translation initiation by ribosomal leaky scanning produces multiple isoforms of the Pif1 helicase, Tomás wrestled with the complex alternative translation initiation mechanism that enables the generation of mitochondrial and nuclear isoforms of this conserved helicase from the same mRNA. He demonstrated that ribosomal leaky scanning produces not only these, but also novel, previously uncharacterized Pif1 isoforms, with a contribution of both in-frame, downstream AUGs as well as near-cognate start codons. This provides an explanation for long-observed,  suboptimal behaviour of the widely employed mitochondrial- (pif1-m1) and nuclear-deficient (pif1-m2) alleles. Importantly, we have taken advantage of this refined model of PIF1 mRNA translation to develop improved mitochondrial- and nuclear-null pif1 mutants, which will serve as valuable tools to elucidate novel functions of this helicase and to disambiguate previously described genetic interactions of PIF1 in the context of nuclear and mitochondrial genome stability.

Today is a special day for the lab. The current issue of Nucleic Acids Research features two papers from the group reflecting the PhD projects of Raquel Carreira Rodríguez and Tomás Lama Díaz.

Raquel´s paper, Concurrent D-loop cleavage by Mus81 and Yen1 yields half-crossover precursors, culminates a long collaboration with the Lumir Krejci´s lab at Masaryk University (Brno, Czech Republic) where she spearheaded the characterization of the activitites of the yeast structure-selective nucleases Mus81-Mms4 and Yen1 on various D-loop substrates.

Our biochemical approach demonstrated that both enzymes can cleave this central recombination intermediate. Crucially, we show for the first time that the simultaneous action of Mus81 and Yen1 on a D-loop, followed by ligation, is sufficient to recreate the formation of a half-crossover precursor in vitro. Our results provide a mechanistic explanation for the formation of half-crossovers and chromosomal loss events that is consistent with previous genetic data, highlighting the relevance of the tight regulation of these SSEs to prevent chromosomal rearrangements.