Omar Pantoja
Omar Pantoja Is a Biologist by the Escuela Nacional de Ciencias Biológicas from the Instituto Politécnico Nacional, Mexico with a B.Sc. awarded in 1982. He got his Ph.D. from the University of Stirling, Scotland, UK in 1988 working on membrane properties of the stomatal guard cells. He did a first PosDoc at the Dept. of Botany at the University of Toronto, under the supervision of Dr. Jack Dainty and Dr. Eduardo Blumwald working on the electrophysiological properties of the tonoplast from sugar beet from 1988 to 1990. Thereafter, he did a second PosDoc at the Dept of Plant Sciences at the University of Oxford under the supervision of Dr. J.A.C. Smith characterising the tonoplast malate channel from CAM plants from 1990 to 1994. From September 1994 to date he has been a PI at the Instituto de Biotecnología from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México working on mechanisms involved in salt tolerance in plants applying a variety of techniques like biochemistry, membrane isolation, patch-clamp, heterologous expression in Xenopus oocytes, identifying the importance of transporters like the tonoplast Na/H antiport the V-ATPase and HKT transporters in salinity tolerance. Recently, his group identified the cargo receptor, cornichon, as a receptor for the OsHKT1;3 transporter, an initial interaction required for the exit of the transporter from the ER to reach his target membrane the Golgi Apparatus. Additional work has demonstrated that the C-terminal from plants, and possibly fungi homologues, is important for the interaction of the receptor with its cargoes. Very recently, the group has characterized the cornichon homologues from the moss Physcomitrium patens, work that will be presented at this meeting.
Abstracts this author is presenting: