Barbara Pernaute obtains a Consolidator grant from the European Research Council 2 M€ for an innovative study in Biology
published on 03/12/2024
Barbara Pernaute will develop the EarlyFate project, which will explore various aspects of early embryonic development in mice with the support of the Consolidator Grant from the ERC.
Barbara Pernaute is currently a Ramón y Cajal researcher at CSIC and holds a Springboard research position at CABD.
Control of DNA damage during embryonic development
The Earlyfate project focuses on understanding the processes that take place during the early stages of mammalian embryonic development, from fertilization to embryo implantation in the maternal uterus. “Fertilization involves the fusion of two highly specialized cells to form a single cell that is capable of giving rise to all the cell lineages of the new organism. This extraordinary capacity is called totipotency, and its acquisition after fertilization involves drastic epigenetic and transcriptomic reprogramming that prepares the newly formed embryo for further development,” explains Barbara Pernaute.
“How genome integrity is controlled has been extensively studied in pathological processes, particularly in cancer, but has been overlooked in the context of embryonic development,” adds the scientist. Hence, the main objective of the project is to study the mechanisms that control the response to DNA damage during the cellular reprogramming that occurs after fertilization, a critical moment in which any cell can contribute to all the organs and tissues of the organism. The study, he assures, will provide a fundamental resource for the optimization of genome editing and engineering techniques in the early embryo and for the improvement of assisted reproduction procedures.