The ISGlobal researcher Elisabet Tintó-Font has received the Ramón Margalef Award in the XX edition of the Awards from the Social Council of the University of Barcelona (UB). This award recognizes the best research published in a journal in the field of experimental and health sciences derived from a doctoral thesis.
Tintó-Font’s work, published in the magazine nature microbiologydescribes how the parasite Plasmodium falciparum It adapts to adverse conditions in the host, such as high temperatures during fever, solving a key mystery in the biology of the parasite.
An investigation that answers key questions
The award-winning study addresses how malaria parasites, which lack the HSF1 transcription factor typical in other eukaryotic organisms, manage to survive the high temperatures associated with fever. Tintó-Font and his thesis director, Alfred Cortés, demonstrated that the PfAP2-HS gene is responsible for regulating this response to «thermal shock». The findings have implications significant: parasites lacking PfAP2-HS are not only more vulnerable to febrile temperatures, but also have greater sensitivity to the antimalarial drug artemisinin.
Elisabet Tintó-Font has a degree in Biomedicine and a master’s degree in Advanced Microbiology. In 2019, he obtained his doctorate in Biomedicine in the laboratory of Alfred Cortés at ISGlobal, where he continues to work as Research assistant. His lines of research include the epigenetic regulation of parasite sexual conversion and response mechanisms to heat shock.
The delivery ceremony was held on December 3 in the Aula Magna of the Historical Building of the UB. Other awards were also presented at this event, such as the José Manuel Blecua Awardfor a research on the perception of safety in urban parks and the Antoni Caparrós Awardwhich recognized advances in the teaching of history and in the treatment of histamine intolerance.
