Background

A pharmacist by training, Rafael Fernández quickly became attracted by microbiology and molecular biology. ‘_The study of living things and my curiosity for these organisms, which are impossible to see with the naked eye but are everywhere and which have built this world, steered me towards this domain in the sciences,’_ he explains.

He picked up his first research funds during his studies, working on the fixing of nitrogen in Halomonas maura, a moderately halophilic bacterium. To continue this research he left, thanks to an EMBO grant, to work for 3 months in Dr. Jan Michiels’ laboratory in the Department of Applied Plant Sciences at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven.

He also obtained a grant from the Spanish government to work at the Centre Supérieur d’Investigations Scientifiques (CSIC) on macrophages infectivity potentiator proteins in Trypanosoma cruzi, the parasite responsible for Chagas’ disease, which is at serious levels in South America.

And it was finally thanks to a grant from the Spanish Alfonso Martin Escudero Foundation that he was able to consider leaving Belgium to join Dr. Annick Wilmotte’s team and to discover two fascinating worlds: the Antarctic and cyanobacteria. ‘The first is the white continent of eternal snow, which makes you dream even whilst you are working. The second is that of these fantastic organisms which are at the root of an oxygenated atmosphere such as we know today and which possess an astonishing capacity to adapt to extreme environments.’ Quite a programme!

Selection of publications

FERNANDEZ-CARAZO R., HODGSON D., CONVEY P., WILMOTTE A., Impoverished cyanobacterial diversity in biotopes of the Transantarctic Mountains (82ºS), Manuscript in preparation.

FERNANDEZ-CARAZO R., Namsaraev Z, Mano MJ, Ertz D, WILMOTTE A., Cyanobacterial diversity for an anthropogenic impact assessment in the Sør Rondane area (Antarctica) Manuscript in preparation.

FERNANDEZ-CARAZO R., GIBSON J, WILMOTTE A., East Antarctic cyanobacteria: completing the molecular diversity around the Amery Shelf., Manuscript in preparation.

ARGANDONA M., FERNANDEZ-CARAZO R., LLAMAS I., MARTINEZ-CHECA F., CABA J.M., QUESADA E. & DEL MORAL A. (2005) The moderately halophilic bacterium Halomonas maura is a free-living diazotroph. Fems Microbiology Letters 244: 69-74.

BARBOSA PEREIRA P.J., VEGA M.C., GONZALEZ-REY E., FERNANDEZ-CARAZO R., MACEDO-RIBEIRO S., GOMIS-RUTH F.X., GONZALEZ A. & Coll M (2002) Trypanosoma cruzi macrophage infectivity potentiator has a rotamase core and a highly exposed alpha-helix. EMBO Reports 3: 88-94.