At the beginning of August Dr Valentina Barrera (@Barrera_LVP) joined my team to work on the BBSRC funded project into the LaNt proteins and their roles in basement membrane formation.
Valentina comes to me with a postdoctoral background in vascular biology including malarial retinopathy research following on from her PhD studies into the immune response to malarial pigment hemozoin. From this she has lots of cool relevant skills that will really help with pushing this project forward particularly the vascular and ocular biology aspects.
the image below is her recent cover image from the journal of infectious disease http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25351204).
With new mAb to human LaNt a31, Valentina has already begun putting those skills in practice and in just a couple of weeks is getting some really impressive results. More to follow here shortly!
By a strange coincidence, Dr Barrera is not only my second Italian but also my second Valentina! This has potential more much confusion and potential hilarity. not least if they end up with a shared first author paper down the line…
LaNts and Laminins 