Dr Natalia Miguel Vior

Natalia is interested in uncovering the huge diversity of natural products synthesised by bacteria in response to their environment, and how we can apply those to improve our lives.

She specialises in the study of bacterial secondary metabolites biosynthesis and regulation, in particular in actinomycetes, but also in Gram-negative bacteria such as Pseudomonas. For that purpose, she applies a combination of microbiology, molecular genetics, mass spectrometry (LCMS) and chemistry techniques.

Additionally, she uses bioinformatics to aid in the discovery and analysis of novel bacterial natural products as well as for metabolomics studies.

Some of the projects Natalia has been involved in the Truman lab are the study of the regulation of bottromycin biosynthesis, an antibiotic active against multidrug resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) produced by the plant pathogen Streptomyces scabies, or the study of antiobiotic bicyclomycin (BCM), useful for the treatment of multi-drug-resistant (MDR) Gram-negative infections, where she focuses on production improvement and analogue generation.