Head of Grapevine-Pathogen Systems Lab
Assistant Professor at Faculdade de Ciências, Universidade de Lisboa
Principal Investigator at Biosystems and Integrative Sciences Institute at Faculdade de Ciências, Universidade de Lisboa
Tel: +351 217522449 (office)
Tel: +351 217522470 (lab)
E-mail: aafigueiredo@fc.ul.pt
Andreia Cristina Figueiredo was born in Lisbon in 1980, studied Biology at the Faculdade de Ciências, Universidade de Lisboa where she was fascinated by plant biology. After her graduation in 2003, she started her PhD in Cellular and Molecular Biology. During this period, she worked on the grapevine constitutive traits that allowed the discrimination between susceptible and tolerant grapevine genotypes, at metabolome and transcriptome levels, to the downy mildew pathogen. She continued working on this model as a postdoc and join Dr. Eva Zyprian team at Julius Kühn-Institut (JKI) where she developed practical skills on the grapevine inoculation with P. viticola. She developed transcriptomics and metabolomics based approaches within the frame of the EraPG granted project – GRASP, to further characterise this interaction. She started her own research program and added proteomics to the characterisation of this pathosystem. She joined Prof. Peter Roepstorff group at the University of Southern Denmark (SDU) to develop this work.
With this systems biology approach, she was able to identify key players and mechanisms associated to pathogen resistance in grapevine and started her research group with defined research lines on the areas of pathogen recognition and signalling.
Her research group, Grapevine Pathogen Systems Lab (GPS Lab) is integrated in the Plant Functional Genomics Group at BioISI, FCUL and is devoted to the characterisation of the regulatory networks involved in plant immune priming events and activation of defence mechanisms.