Jerónimo Cifuentes-Anticevic

About

I’m a Biochemist working in Marine Microbiology.
I describe myself as a self-taught Bioinformatician with experience in Molecular Biology, that also enjoys going out sampling. My main scientific interest is to combine bioinformatic sequence analysis to determine novel microbial capabilities, with a wet lab approach to test these hypotheses. During my MSc thesis, I worked on the description of proteorhodopsins-bearing bacteria in Antarctic coastal waters, and now I’m interested in the diversity and distribution of type-1 rhodopsins in polar marine environments. I’m also working on the discovery of novel enzymes that degrade PET, a widely used plastic that accumulates as waste at similar rates to its production. The nitrogen cycle in Antarctic coastal waters is still an understudied area, and together with María E. Alcamán-Arias, we are evaluating the nitrification and nitrogen fixation processes, combining molecular biology, meta-omics and stable isotope techniques.