User:Gabriel Martinez-Galvez

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Contact Info

Gabriel Martinez-Galvez

I'm a last year microbiology undergraduate student with a minor in physics and half way through a double major in biomedical engineering. I am also a gamer to the bone, and a heavy soccer and basketball fan. Since high school I've found it fascinating and exciting to think about programming cells into living bio-robots automated to perform specific actions inside the human body. For that matter I've found systems biology and synthetic biology as my main motivation for my studies and graduation thesis with the Biophysics Lab at the Universidad de los Andes.

Evolution biologists define fitness as a quantitative parameter for the measurement and contrasting of an organism’s ability to successfully reproduce in its environment. To be fit, may then be understood as the balance between phenotypic advantages over other members of the population and the energetic cost associated with those benefits. In the case of the sugar uptake of Saccharomyces cerevisiae, to be fit must mean to be able to take the sugar that yields the greatest energy with the minimum effort. Assuming natural selection optimizes the organisms’ adaptation to their environment and possible changes in it, that doesn’t necessarily mean that it takes them to a maximum fitness. With this in mind, it is possible to think about optimizing metabolic processes through genetic circuit design (synthetic biology)to a specific environment as some kind of synthetic evolution. In my thesis I’m looking for the optimum feedback strength of S.cerevisiae’s GAL system by the periodic or random carbon sources administration. With this data, I’d like to determine the best adaptive conditions for the wild strain W303, as well as to infer information about its natural environment.

Education

Research interests

  1. Desing of new biological processes through synthetic biology
  2. Dendritic Cell information processing towards specific immune response coordination
  3. Molecular psychology for the better understanding of emotions and aging phenomena

Publications

None YET!

  1. Goldbeter A and Koshland DE Jr. An amplified sensitivity arising from covalent modification in biological systems. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 1981 Nov;78(11):6840-4. DOI:10.1073/pnas.78.11.6840 | PubMed ID:6947258 | HubMed [Paper1]
  2. JACOB F and MONOD J. Genetic regulatory mechanisms in the synthesis of proteins. J Mol Biol. 1961 Jun;3:318-56. DOI:10.1016/s0022-2836(61)80072-7 | PubMed ID:13718526 | HubMed [Paper2]

    leave a comment about a paper here

  3. ISBN:0879697164 [Book1]

All Medline abstracts: PubMed | HubMed

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