Maria Eugenia Guazzaroni, Professor, FFCLRP-USP.

Telephone: +55(16) 3315 3695   E-mail:meguazzaronii@ffclrp.usp.br    Currículo Lattes

Lines of Research

Biotechnology plays a crucial role in the development of biocatalysts for use in industry, agriculture, medicine, and power generation. There is currently a growing demand for enzymes with better catalytic performance or tolerance to specific parameters of industrial processes.

Metagenomics takes advantage of the richness of genetic and biochemical diversity present in the genomes of microorganisms found in nature and provides a set of new technologies aimed at screening new catalytic activities with biotechnological applications potential. However, the biased and low level of heterologous protein expression in Escherichia coli, along with the use of suboptimal metagenomic screening strategies, usually results in a low success rate in identifying new enzymes or other genes of industrial interest. 

In this sense, our research group aims to develop new tools to improve target gene recovery. We search for genes with biotechnological potential by screening metagenomic libraries using synthetic biology approaches.