Scorpion Venom

the University of São Paulo, Brazil, in 1987. Since them, she has been working with animal toxins. After spending one year of a postdoctoral training at the lab of Prof. Lourival Domingos Possani at the Institute of Biotechnology of the National Autonomous University of Mexico, in 2004-2005, her research interest was pointed to arthropod venom toxins, mainly the scorpion peptides acting on ion channels. Over the last 10 years, her work-mainly focused on the identification and characterization of scorpion toxins-combined proteomic and transcriptomic approaches. She is professor at the University of Brasilia, Brazil, where she teaches physiology and pharmacology. Her investigative work resulted in about 40 scientific publications, independently cited 400 times. She advised more than 70 students at levels of college, master, and Ph.D. degrees.

Prof. Lourival Domingos Possani was born in Brazil, now Mexican by naturalization; completed his college degree in Porto Alegre, Brazil, on subjects related to natural sciences; and obtained his Ph.D. degree in molecular biophysics at the University of Paris in 1970. He spent a postdoctoral training at the Rockefeller University in New York and sabbatical years at the Max Planck Institute in Germany and at the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. Since 1974, he is professor at the Institute of Biotechnology of the National Autonomous University of Mexico. The work performed is mainly related to scorpion venom components structure and function. His contributions to science are printed in 306 publications of international journals listed in the Science Citation Index. He has 40 patents of invention approved in several countries. In his laboratory, 84 students have finished their thesis at level of college, master, and Ph. D. degrees. His work is cited more than 7,000 times by other authors. He received many recognitions and distinctions for his work, among which is the Redi Award from the International Society on Toxinology; the Doctorate Honnoris Causa by the University of Debrecen, Hungary; the National Prize of Science in Arts from the Mexican Government; the National Autonomous University of Mexico prize on natural sciences; and innumerous recognition from pharmaceutical companies. He was an international scholar of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute for 10 years, and recently received the Carlos Slim prize 2014 for working on health problems of Latin American and Caribbean countries.

Dr. Ricardo C. Rodríguez de la Vega is a Mexican scientist holding a college degree in chemistry and a Ph.D. in biochemistry, both from the National Autonomous University of Mexico. After staying for 10 years at the lab of Prof. Lourival Domingos Possani, where he started working as undergraduate student, he received further postdoctoral training in Germany (European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg) and France. He has also been a visiting scientist at the National Natural History Museum in Paris (France). A chemist-turned-evolutionary biologist, he has a long-lasting research interest on whether and how the evolutionary history of biotic interactions has been recorded at the molecular level. Over the last 10 years, his work has been mainly focused on the study of animal venoms and venom components, with combined experimental and computational biology approaches. He has contributed with some landmark evidence and analysis into two main areas: 1) the molecular and evolutionary basis of target recognition by animal toxins, including the identification of previously neglected interaction modes of potassium channel blocking toxins, and 2) the convergent recruitment of protein folds into animal venoms, including one of the earliest identified venom recruitment events from immune response proteins and a paradigm-shifting analysis of venom evolution. A heavily cited author (over 1,000 independent citations to his nearly 30 papers), passionate for teaching and outreaching, Dr. Ricardo C. Rodríguez de la Vega is currently working in the genetics, ecology and evolution team at the Paris-Sud University in France.