Helder Maiato wins million-dollar grant from the European Research Council
How has the cell division process adapted to changes in the number of chromosomes that have occurred throughout evolution? This is the central question of the project that earned Helder Maiato a grant from the European Research Council (ERC) worth three million euros. He is the only researcher at the University of Porto to have an ERC Advanced Grant (now awarded), an ERC Consolidator Grant (2015), and an ERC Starting Grant (2010) on his CV.
In this work, the team led by Helder Maiato will study two genetically identical species of deer – one with six chromosomes and the other with 46 (like humans) – and try to understand the challenges that each species has to deal with when cells divide. The real motivation behind this work, explains the i3S researcher, is to understand the mechanisms of evolution at a cellular level: “One of the characteristics that differentiates us from chimpanzees is the difference in the number of chromosomes, because we ‘inherited’ two chromosomes from chimpanzees that fused and gave rise to a distinct chromosome in humans. Humans have 46 chromosomes (23 pairs) and chimpanzees have 48 (24 pairs). This raises a series of questions: did the fusion of two chromosomes give us any advantage in the survival of the species? Are cell division processes more efficient? Are there more or fewer errors? And is having more or fewer errors a disadvantage?”
All these questions will be transposed to the two species of deer, where the difference in the number of chromosomes is more pronounced. The genomes of these two species have already been sequenced and “we are now resequencing the most repetitive regions that are not yet known together with an American consortium”, highlights Helder Maiato. For now, the researcher adds, “we know that both species diverged from a common ancestor that had 70 chromosomes and we know, for example, that deer are the mammals that have the lowest incidence of cancer. But can the one with six chromosomes live longer without cancer? There seems to be some advantage in having fewer chromosomes, but how much fewer?”
“The cherry on top would be to understand the minimum number of chromosomes that a mammalian cell can tolerate. In the laboratory, through genetic engineering, we will fuse chromosomes to understand this limit. We will try to create a mammalian cell with a single chromosome, to see if it is possible to compact all the genetic information into a single chromosome, similar to what happens naturally in some insects".
This project was born ten years ago in our laboratory by two very courageous PhD students – Danica Drpic and Ana Almeida – who began by establishing the system, and was inspired by geneticist António Lima de Faria, considered one of the “fathers” of chromosome biology, who passed away in 2023 at the age of 102. And the researcher adds: “If I won this ERC, I had as an inner mission to visit him in Sweden to tell him the news in person. He was one of the first to look at this deer and saw the question. Being exposed to that question and the many conversations I had with him inspired me, so this project is dedicated to his memory and his pioneering spirit. Later, in conversations with a Japanese researcher who was in my laboratory – Naoyuki Okada – we decided to move forward with the idea of exploring the system further and it was he who began to conduct comparative experiments on cell division with cells from these two deer. This allowed us to start building this project, which will now have legs to stand on with a team of highly competent and enthusiastic young researchers, whom I thank for getting us this far”.
This funding from the ERC, stresses the researcher, “gives me peace of mind so that for five years I can concentrate on Science, without having to worry for a second about its immediate usefulness. I believe, and History supports me, that great scientific revolutions are born first of all from human curiosity. Thank goodness the ERC understood this and the results of this programme are clear to see, with 14 Nobel Prizes awarded to researchers who received this support, from Physics to Medicine. An interesting aspect is that changes in the number of chromosomes are the most common characteristic known in human cancers. In other words, cancer cells have managed to recapitulate over the course of a lifetime what evolution took millions of years to do. I am absolutely convinced that our question, which is merely basic for now, will have fundamental repercussions for understanding and treating cancer in the future”.
About Helder Maiato
With a degree in Biochemistry (1998) and a PhD in Biomedical Sciences from the University of Porto, Helder Maiato, aged 48, is a Coordinating Researcher of the research group “Chromosome Dynamics and Instability” and a visiting Full Professor at the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Porto (FMUP). Author of over one hundred scientific publications, he has distinguished himself internationally in the study of cell division from Porto.
In addition to three ERC grants awarded by the European Research Council (ERC), Helder Maiato has won numerous national and international awards and funding, including the Crioestaminal Prize (2007), the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation Frontiers of Life Sciences Programme (2007), the Human Frontier Programme (2010), the Louis-Jeantet Young Investigator Career Prize (2015), FLAD Lifescience 2020 (2015), the University of Porto Award for Excellence in Scientific Research (2019), the la CaixaResearch Health Research Competition (2021), the Gilead Génese Prize (2023), and others.
In 2016, he was elected by his peers to join the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO), due to the merit and excellence of his scientific work in this field, and in June of this year, he was one of 15 members elected to join the Council, the EMBO governing body responsible for managing the organisation, for a period of three years.