Antonio Camargo, Ph.D.
- Title
- Assistant Professor
- Department
- Biochemistry
- Institution
- University of São Paulo
- Address
- Av. Prof. Lineu Prestes, 748, Butantã
- City, State, ZIP
- São Paulo, SP, 05508-900
- Country
- Brazil
- [email protected]
- Website
- https://iq.usp.br/portaliqusp/?q=en/users/ant%C3%B4nio-pedro-de-castello-branco-da-rocha-camargo
- Research field
- Computational biology
Research
Our group studies the evolution and diversification of life on Earth at a global scale. We aim to uncover fundamental evolutionary patterns and answer questions such as: What processes generate the diversity of life? What shapes the structure and content of genomes? How do new genes and protein functions arise? Can we predict trends in genome evolution?
To address these questions, we develop and apply computational methods for the comparative analysis of genomes and proteins. Our approach combines large-scale processing of sequencing data with a range of techniques, including genome and protein language models. This allows us to model highly complex emerging patterns and learn how genes and genomes change across the tree of life.
Partnership Award
With the Partnership Award, Paulo José P. L. Teixeira, Ph.D., and Antonio Camargo, Ph.D., will team up to study plant immune receptor specificity. Plants harbor an enormous and largely unexplored repertoire of immune receptors, which are critical in defending against pathogens. In most cases, however, it is not known which pathogen-derived proteins, or effectors, activate which receptors. This limits the ability to engineer disease-resistant cultivars of agriculturally important plants. This project pairs Teixeira’s expertise in plant immunity with Camargo’s background in computational biology and evolution. They will establish a platform to explore the natural diversity of a group of immune receptors called nucleotide-binding leucine-rich repeats (NLRs) and to identify putative novel receptor-effector pairs. They will use this platform to screen a large selection of plant species for NLRs that respond to two effectors of Xanthomonas bacteria, which cause a range of plant diseases, and validate the predictions experimentally in the model plant Nicotiana benthamiana.
