MED researcher Cláudia Vicente elected to the Board of the European Society of Nematologists

The 35th Symposium of the European Society of Nematologists was held in Córdoba, Spain, from 15 to 19 April. The team of researchers from NemaLab – MED-UÉvora’s Nematology Laboratory was present at this symposium, where they presented some of the results of the projects underway in this laboratory, namely PratyOmics (PI: Cláudia Vicente) and NemaWAARS (PI: Margarida Espada). Researchers Cláudia Vicente, Margarida Espada, Carlos Gutiérrez-Gutiérrez, Madalena Mendonça, Marina Costa and Pedro Barbosa presented their work.

The European Society of Nematology (ESN) meeting was also held during the event, at which researcher Cláudia Vicente was elected as an ESN Governing Board Member for a four-year term.

Claúdia Vicente joined NemaLab in 2009 (coordinated at the time by Professor Manuel Mota) to study the role of the bacterium associated with Bursophelenchus xylophilus in the Pine Wilt Disease (PWD) complex. From 2012 to 2016, the researcher was awarded a post-doctoral scholarship in Japan, first by the Heiwa Nakajima Foundation and then by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, in the laboratory of Koichi Hasegawa (Chubu University, Japan) to continue her studies on the biology of Bursophelenchus xylophilus and its associated microbiota. She is currently the head of NemaLab and her current projects centre on studying the microbiota associated with nematodes (e.g., pine wood nematode), and understanding the molecular mechanisms involved in the parasitism of migratory nematodes (e.g., Protylenchus penetrans) in order to develop new control approaches.