Rui Silva

Biography

Rui finished his BSc and MSc degree in Biochemistry from the Universidade de Coimbra. During his Master’s thesis, he was working on energetic metabolism, more specifically evaluating the effects of silver nanoparticles on the energetic functions of mitochondria. His Master thesis is entitled “The effect of silver nanoparticles: a chronic in vivo study for the evaluation of hepatic mitochondrial toxicity”. Almost two years he worked as a research fellow in Italy as well as he was visiting research student in Ireland. During this period, his work was focused on the epigenetic regulation of adipose tissue physiology.

Summary of ESR Project

My project titled as “Mitochondrial biomarkers to predict hepatic surgery success” the main objective is to predict the outcome of liver surgeries using mitochondrial biomarkers. In order to find that we use animal models of postoperative hepatic failure (PHF) to measure end- points of mitochondrial function at different points after surgery. So by analysing these we can predict the susceptibility to hepatic mitochondrial damage and design the drugs in near future to improve the liver function after surgeries.

Research methodologies will include techniques in liver surgery of rodent models, miRNA/mtDNA screening, and high throughput mitochondrial function assays(e.g. respiration, membrane potential, oxidative stress and mitochondrial gene expression), as well as provide IR fingerprint in serum by IR-based methods.

Supervisor:

Dr. Joan Catafau

Secondments:

German Research Center for Environmental Health (HMGU), Germany
Center for Neuroscience and Cell Biology (CNC), Portugal

Co-Supervisors:

Dr. Hans Zischka
Dr. Carlos Palmeira
Dr. Paulo Oliveira