Pathogenic bacteria are great at secreting because their pathogenicity depends on the efficient, tightly controlled release of a battery of chemicals into their environment. What if we used their secretion machinery for our benefit?
A significant part of modern biotechnology relies on genetically modified bacteria to produce proteins and other compounds of interest. Yet one of the major bottlenecks in industrial production is not making these molecules, but recovering them. Most valuable products remain trapped inside bacterial cells, necessitating costly, disruptive extraction and purification procedures that limit scalability.
During her fellowship at the Centro de Ciencias Genómicas, UNAM, María José Acuña Mondragón explored an alternative approach: engineering bacterial secretion systems to export desired products directly into the surrounding medium. Her work focused on the Type III Secretion System (T3SS) of Salmonella enterica, a sophisticated molecular machine.
Working under the supervision of José Eduardo Soto Guzmán at CCG-UNAM and with the support of Juan Manuel Cevallos Cevallos from CIBE-ESPOL, María José developed and validated a suite of genetic tools to better understand how the T3SS recognizes proteins and directs them for secretion. She additionally established a rapid, high-throughput screening platform that will allow future researchers to identify improved secretion signals and optimize export efficiency.
Beyond its technical achievements, the fellowship highlights the importance of advanced scientific infrastructure for the development of biotechnology in Latin America. Research involving bacterial pathogens and sophisticated genome engineering requires specialized facilities, rigorous biosafety standards, modern sequencing technologies, and rapid molecular construction methods that are not universally available across the region. Institutions such as Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM), which routinely and generously welcome visiting researchers into their laboratories, play a critical role in expanding regional scientific capacity by sharing expertise, equipment, and training opportunities.
UNU-BIOLAC warmly thanks María José Acuña Mondragón, her host mentor José Eduardo Soto Guzmán and the team at CCG-UNAM, as well as Juan Manuel Cevallos Cevallos and CIBE-ESPOL, for their commitment to advancing biotechnology in the r
