Luis Javier Galindo González, a Ramón y Cajal researcher from the Department of Ecology and the University Institute for Water Research at the University of Granada (UGR), has been honored with an ERC Starting Grant from the European Research Council. This funding, amounting to €1.5 million, is aimed at excellent researchers in the early stages of their careers and will enable Galindo to develop his project titled 'ProtistEye – Illuminating the evolution of eye-like structures across the eukaryotic tree of life'.
With this latest award, the University of Granada now boasts a total of 8 ERC grants across its various modalities. The UGR's Office of International Projects (OFPI) is responsible for promoting, advising on, and managing this excellence-driven call, as well as others under the European Commission's Horizon Europe framework program.
Galindo's research primarily aims to reconstruct the evolution of eye-like structures found in protists, which are eukaryotic microbes. He seeks to determine if a common blueprint of functional, molecular, and structural elements exists among the light-sensing systems of unicellular and multicellular organisms. "There is a vast diversity of protists that remains largely unexplored. We have discovered that some possess organelles we can consider eye-like and which have not been studied," explains Galindo.
By analyzing their functional, molecular, and structural components, the 'ProtistEye' project will shed light on how these light-perceiving organelles have evolved. "Studying protist eyes can help us understand how such a complex structure has evolved multiple times independently, both in unicellular and multicellular organisms," stated the researcher. The financial support from the European program will allow Galindo to develop and consolidate, over the next five years, a research line focused on the evolution of protist sensory structures and the diversity of these organisms within the eukaryotic tree.
