Professor Dr Maria-Elena Torres-Padilla

Research Priorities: Epigenetics, stem cells, reprogramming, cellular plasticity, developmental biology
Maria-Elena Torres-Padilla is a Mexican-French biologist, who studies the mechanisms that underlie the plasticity of cells. Her focus is foremost on epigenetic principles, which are the cellular processes that influence the activity of genes. Maria-Elena Torres-Padilla elucidated the role histones, a class of core proteins, play during cell differentiation, as well as other regulatory processes. Her discoveries considerably deepened the understanding of totipotency, which is the ability of cells to form a complete organism. The research of Maria-Elena Torres-Padilla can be of importance for cell therapies.
To replace diseased cells with healthy ones in cell regeneration or replacement therapy, it must first be understood how new cells are generated. In this context, Maria-Elena Torres-Padilla is concerned with the reprogramming of cells. Her working group combines high-resolution microscopy with approaches from genomics to study the epigenetic principles that underlie cellular reprogramming on early embryos as well as stem cells models.
Her team’s research is focused foremost on deciphering the mechanisms of cellular plasticity and the establishment of totipotency and pluripotency during mammalian early embryon development: In this state, cells posses the ability to generate all cell types of the body. The group is devoted specifically to find out how cellular plasticity is controlled by epigenetic processes. Their research contributed to the discovery of key determinants and chromatin regulators of totipotency. Thelater are proteins that control the material of which chromosomes are formed. 
An understanding of this significant transition during development is essential to understand how a stem cell can generate differentiated cells. These insights can be useful in future cell therapies.