Carmen Mañas Torres

I’m Carmen Mañas, a PhD student from the Spanish National Center for Biotechnology. I currently live and work in Madrid but I hail from Granada, a beautiful region in the south of Spain. Ever since I began my studies in Biology, I have found a great interest in all aspects of life. After a first immersion in a laboratory studying degradation of contaminant compounds by Pseudomonas putida and later developing my final degree project in Utrecht University in the study of the pathogen Neisseria meningitidis, I have discovered a special interest in synthetic biology, a discipline with infinite possibilities. I consider myself lucky to have the opportunity of doing my PhD thesis in “Engineering bacteria for biomedical applications” lab of Prof. Luis Ángel Fernández , where I am exploring different techniques from modifying bacterial genetics to In vivo experiments, apart from building immune libraries from camelid nanobodies. Nanobodies are essential to understanding the work in our lab, especially when it comes to the displaying them on the surface of bacteria or binding molecules in the surface of tumor cells with a therapeutic purpose, which happens to be the object of study for my PhD.