Dr. Alejandra Guerra Castellano has won the Extraordinary Doctorate Award that the University of Seville awards each year to doctors who have defended their thesis in the academic year immediately preceding each call.

Dr. Guerra defended her thesis, entitled “Phosphorylation of Cytochrome c: Functional and Structural Features“, on January 27, 2017 at cicCartuja, obtaining the highest grade of Outstanding “Cum Laude” unanimously. Her thesis directors were Dr. D. Miguel Ángel De la Rosa Acosta, Professor at the University of Seville and Dr. D. Antonio J. Díaz Quintana, Professor at the University of Seville.

Cytochrome c is an inducer of programmed cell death, a mechanism that cells use to ‘commit suicide’ in a controlled manner when they have a large number of errors that compromise their viability. However, in the case of cancer cells, they are able to evade the signals that tell them to commit suicide in order to avoid their proliferation. The findings described in this doctoral thesis provide a new framework for investigating the modulation of mitochondrial activity by cytochrome c phosphorylation, and thus being able to develop new, more selective therapeutic approaches for pathologies such as cancer or ischemia.

Alejandra Guerra has developed her research career in the Biointeractomics group at the Institute of Chemical Research