Mirelle Takaki’s PhD in Chemistry, at Instituto de Química de São Carlos, Universidade de São Paulo

Last Thursday, April 17th, Mirelle Takaki presented and defended her PhD thesis. It was a virtual defense, because of the current restrictions of social contact. The PhD committee was composed by Professors Camila M. Crnkovic (Universidade de São Paulo), Mario Palma (Universidade Estadual Paulista “Júlio de Mesquita Filho”, campus Rio Claro), Edson Rodrigues Filho (Universidade Federal de São Carlos) and Moacir Rossi Forim (Universidade Federal de São Carlos), and included myself.

 

 

 

 

 

 

It was an excellent opportunity to discuss Mirelle’s project and results. The expertise of the committee’s members was very important to address many aspects of Mirelle’s work. It was a great time of science discussion – Mirelle and I thank very much for the Professors’ willingness and time to read and evaluate Mirelle’s PhD work.

Mirelle’s first project focused on developing methods to investigate and better understand the role of fungal secondary metabolites in promoting phytopathogenicity. Her approach was largely based on metabolomics, but also on modern isolation and identification tools such as HPLC-SPE-NMR. Results from this project are really interesting and need final experiments to be completed. This project was developed in collaboration with Professor Roger Linington, at the Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada, where Mirelle did work during one year.

A second project was also developed by Mirelle, on predatory-prey relationships of marine invertebrates. Mirelle’s approach to this problem was also based on metabolomics, but also on isolation/identification and total synthesis, in collaboration with Professor Sarpong’s group at the University of California, Berkeley. Some final results also need to be obtained in order to close this second project.

We hope to submit Mirelle’s manuscripts for publication soon.