Supervisors: Prof. Flavia Mascagni and Dr. Gabriele Usai
Research Field: Plant Genetics
Keywords:Genetics, bioinformatics, wheat, transposable elements, exaptation
Headquarters address: Via del Borghetto 80, 56124 Pisa, Italy, building B19
valentina.colombo@phd.unipi.it
Valentina is a PhD student in Plant Genetics at the Department of Agriculture, Food and Environment of the University of Pisa.
Her university studies began at the University of Pavia in July 2021, with a bachelor’s degree in biotechnology. She subsequently specialised in Plant and Microbial biotechnology at the University of Pisa, graduating with honours in February 2025. During her Master’s Thesis, she conducted bioinformatics analysis, such as Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and Genome-wide association studies (GWAS), to understand how farmers’ traditional knowledge can be useful combined with molecular data to accelerate genetic gain in Ethiopian barley breeding.
Valentina is applying her bioinformatics expertise to the bread wheat genome, focusing on ETEs (exapted transposable elements). Her PhD project, carried out within the FIS 2 “Next-G” project, investigates the evolutionary impact of transposons on the creation of new genes and the mechanisms that drive this process in wheat evolution. By examining these genes, her work aims to uncover how ETEs may have contributed to wheat evolution and domestication. Furthermore, her project aims to clarify how TEs drive gene creation in response to well-defined selective pressures during the initial phases of domestication, and to investigate the ongoing adaptation of wheat landraces.