MEDINA Invited Seminar Series – Dr. Pablo Cruz-Morales
Granada, March 17, 2025
For the next seminar in the MEDINA Seminar Series, we are delighted to have Dr. Pablo Cruz-Morales, senior researcher at the Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Biosustainability (Lyngby, Denmark), who will give a talk entitled “How fungi will save us from the climate change apocalypse”.
The seminar will take place next April 3rd at 12 pm in the Auditorium of Fundación MEDINA, Fundación PTS, Granada.
This is a perfect opportunity to learn firsthand about the advances being made in the biosynthesis of natural products as well as new platforms to produce chemical compounds based on fungal chemistry with utility for humans. In addition, you will be able to connect with colleagues from the scientific community of Granada and its surroundings to exchange innovative ideas and open the door to future collaborations. We hope to see you there!
If you cannot attend in person, there is the possibility to connect to the seminar via Zoom (registration required).
About the speaker: Dr. Pablo Cruz-Morales is a biochemical engineer from Villahermosa, Mexico, and is dedicated to the study of the evolution, diversity, and biosynthesis of natural products. His research involves a combination of chemistry, molecular evolution, and genetics. Since the fall of 2021, he has led the Yeast Natural Products laboratory at the Novo Nordisk Center for Biosustainability at the Technical University of Denmark.
His research group is working on developing new platforms to produce chemical products by exploiting the impressive chemistry of the fungal kingdom. In addition, he has lived and worked as a scientist in Mexico, Germany, the Netherlands, France, Australia, the United States, and Denmark.
Abstract: For about 150 years industrial chemistry has revolved around petroleum. Our transportation, food, and health are dangerously linked to this non-renewable resource that will be depleted in about 50 years. The world urgently needs new chemical processes that can support us sustainably.
Fungi are extraordinary chemists; they make molecules for competition, attack, defense, communication, deception, energy-storage, and structure-building. We study fungal chemistry to learn how to use it to make polymers, drugs, agrochemicals, fuels for aviation, rocketry, and shipping.
Our work involves collecting and cultivating fungi, usually complex species with limited knowledge available. We look at the natural chemicals they produce, and decode the chemical recipes stored in their DNA. We then transfer the DNA-written recipes to simpler, laboratory-friendly fungi who can then make the chemicals. We modify the recipes to create variants of the natural chemicals, iterating this process until we get molecules suitable for human needs.
In this talk I will present our fungal chemical discovery and engineering platform and some of their potential applications.
