Plant Nematode Interactions: A View on Compatible Interrelationships

Carolina Escobar completed a first degree in Biology at the University Autonoma of Madrid where she also received her M.Sc. degree. She was a PhD student at the John Innes Center, UK, in Molecular aspects of oxidative stress in plants, receiving her PhD degree from the University of East Anglia, UK in 1998. After a brief post-doctoral position at Wageningen University, Netherlands, on molecular analysis of the Rhizobium interaction, she moved at Castilla La Mancha (UCLM) University in 1999 as part of the group of Plant Biotechnology and Molecular Biologyleaded by Carmen Fenoll. In 2003, she started her own research group on molecular and developmental aspects of the plant-nematode interaction with the aim to identify biotechnology tools for nematode control supported by National and EU funding. She holds an assistant professorship position at the Department of Environmental Sciences, UCLM, and teaches in different courses as Functional Cell Biology, Plant physiology, Genetic Engineering and Systems Biology. She has been also a visitor researcher at Durham University, UK, and at the National Biotechnology Center in Madrid, Spain. As a result, she has supervised 5 PhD thesis and more than 20 final research projects for M. Sc. students and undergraduates. She actively participates in the EU Erasmus mobility program supervising several students every year and holds extensive collaborations with different groups in Europe. She also keeps active a research line on the initial plant responses to contaminants as heavy metals, pointing to the restoration of local Hg contaminated areas.

Carmen Fenoll obtained her PhD in Biological Sciences at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid/ National Research Council-CSIC, working on photosynthetic bacteria. She moved to the field of plant molecular biology as a Fulbright postdoc at the University of California-San Diego (CA) and established her group at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid in 1990 as an Associate Professor. In 2000, she moved to the Universidad de Castilla-la Mancha as part of a team to set up a new Faculty and Research Institute on Environmental Sciences in Toledo (Spain). Since then, she is Professor of Plant Biology at the Faculty of Environmental Sciences and Biochemistry in that University, where she teaches molecular biology, genetic engineering, genomics, plant physiology and biotechnology. She coordinates the research group on Plant Biotechnology and Molecular Biology, interested in the regulation of gene expression and cell differentiation and development using molecular genetics and genomics in several biological systems, one of which is nematode feeding sites induced by Meloidogyne spp. in Arabidopsis thaliana. She has also been Visiting Scientist at the Salk Institute in La Jolla, CA, and Tinker Full Professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison