Rafael Silva-Rocha, Professor, FMRP-USP

Telephone: +55  (16) 99336-4881   E-mail:silvarochar@gmail.com    Currículo Lattes

Lines of Research:

• Through the unveiling of the mechanisms of gene regulation, the group targets the formation of new concepts and the construction of new tools for the engineering of regulatory circuits in living cells, aiming at various biotechnological applications. The group uses a combination of molecular biology tools coupled with computational approaches to address the various aspects of gene regulation, using the construction and characterization of mutants, the characterization of the promoters bound to the reporter gene GFP, the analysis bioinformatics in genome and transcriptomes, in addition to the development of mathematical models aimed at the description of the phenomena of interest. Given the great complexity and multidisciplinarity of the works carried out, students of different areas of knowledge (Biology, Chemistry, Physics, Mathematics, Computer Science, etc.) can join the group. Thus, the main lines of research of the group are:
• Development of new genetic tools for microorganisms:

It aims to develop new techniques and tools for the genetic manipulation of living organisms, focusing mainly on the construction and characterization of modular vectors optimized for Gram-negative bacteria and filamentous fungi.

• Systems Biology:

It aims to study the properties of regulatory networks of organisms of interest through bioinformatics and computational biology to integrate large-scale data, mainly structural and functional genomics and transcriptomes.

• Synthetic Biology:

It aims at the design, construction, and characterization of new regulatory circuits through biological parts and computational models to redesign microorganisms for biotechnological applications.