Francisco Rodríguez-Valera
Professor (Catedrático)
Departmental Affiliation: Microbiología y Producción Vegetal
Address:
División de Microbiología
Universidad Miguel Hernández
Apartado 18
03550 San Juan de Alicante
Alicante, Spain
Tel: +34 965 91 9451
Fax: +34 965 91 9457 / 9576
E-mail: frvalera@umh.es
Research Interests
We explore bacterial diversity in natural environments, specifically aquatic marine environments including the sea itself, coastal lagoons and hypersaline environments derived from evaporation of seawater. For this, we use molecular identity markers such as the ribosomal RNA gene amplified by PCR techniques from natural samples. We combine this approach with new techniques to retrieve in culture novel organisms with potential in biotechnology. It has been estimated that the potential harvest of useful products and processes from this unknown prokaryotic diversity dwarfs that of the rainforest. Now we use mostly metagenomics as the strategy to study of marine and coastal hypersaline environments. This strategy will most certainly have a profound impact in the study of prokaryotic diversity from both, environmental and population, perspectives. We are also interested in how diversity is maintained and generated in bacterial populations and how they change with time. This dimension of evolutionary or population Microbiology is extremely important and largely unexplored. The structure of diversity is an extraordinarily complex problem but one that is essential to understand and predict issues of paramount importance such as the spread of antibiotic resistance or the emergence of new and deathly bacterial infections. The Evolutionary Genomics Group formed after the incorporation to the group of Dr. Alex Mira (a genomicist) addresses these issues.
