Guadalupe Sabio

BsC in Veterinary Medicine at the Univ Extremadura, were I did Master’s thesis, which was awarded the prize for the best Master’s Thesis of the University (2001) ( FEBS Lett and PNAS, in which I was first and second author). Dr. Sabio obtained her PhD in the British Medical Research Council in Dundee and Univ Extremadura under the supervision of Ana Cuenda, in Philip Cohen´s department where she learned how to study protein phosphorylation and to find new kinase substrates. There, she discovered several substrates of p38γ and p38δ and became an expert in protein interactions and in finding novel in vitro and in vivo substrates. She described for the first time that SAP97 was a physiological substrate of p38γ and the importance of phosphorylation in regulating the interactions and scaffolding functions of SAP97. She obtained several scholarships and made remarkable advances in the understanding of p38γ/δ function. This work is documented by first-author publications in Biochem J (2004) and EMBO J (2005), and as a co-author in JBC (2005) and FEBS J (2009). She also received the award for the best PhD Thesis at the Unv of Extremadura (2005). After obtaining her PhD, she moved to the UMASS (Worcester, MA, USA), to study the in vivo function of MAPK with Dr. Roger Davis. She made important contributions to the understanding of the role of JNK1 in different tissues and its implication in diabetes. This progress was reflected in several first-author publications. In Science (2008), she described the effects of JNK1 deficiency in adipose tissue, and also obtained a related patent. This work has been reviewed in two leading journals (Science and Hepatology). In Cell Metab (2009), she described the effects of JNK1 deficiency in the liver (also reviewed in Hepatology). She also demonstrated that JNK1 deficiency in muscle results in increased insulin sensitivity (Mol Cell Biol 2010). In addition, she demonstrated that lack of JNK1 in brain leads to increase circulating levels of T3 (Genes and development, 2010). She also wrote a review summarizing the role of JNK in metabolism (Trends Biochem Sci 2010). Finally, she published a paper in Mol Cell Biol (2011) about JNK and lung cancer. She also worked on the role of p38MAP kinases, in collaboration with Dr Mercedes Rincón, at Vermont. (Science 2008, Int J Biol Sci 2009, J Immunol 2011 Blood 2011) and collaborated on other projects (second authorship in Cell (2009) and the role of JNK1 and JNK2 in liver Cell metabolism 2014. In Nov 2009, she joined the CNB in Spain to study how p38γ controls PSF interaction with RNA (J Cell Sci 2010). Afterwards, she established as an independent PI at CNIC, thanks to the award of an ERC Starting Grant. She also got other important National and international Grants: a 3 MICINN-SAF Projects, two European Association for the Study of Diabetes projects. Also, she obtained a collaboration grant from the CAM. Right now, her work is focus in the role of stress kinases in the development of metabolic diseases and cancer trying to understand the network of this pathway. She has published four papers as corresponding senior author in the Journal Clinical Investigation (2013) in which we show that these kinases control TNF production through the phosphorylation of eEF2K, in Nature Communications (2016) in which we demonstrate that p38gamma/delta control heart growth by the phosphorylation and degradation of the mTOR inhibitor, DEPTOR and in EMBO J (2016) in which we demonstrate that p38gamma/delta are activated in liver during steatosis. And finally, a Nature Communications in press where she found the role of MKK6 in white adipose tissue browning. She wrote a revision about the MAPK and the TNF signalling and production Seminars in Immunology (2014) and another one in J Mol Endocrinol. Her research has received already very important awards as Loreal-Unesco Spain. 2010; and Principe de Girona 2012 award of Science, and the star of Madrid. She has also been awarded by the Spanish Society of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (SEBBM) 2016.