Biochemical Journal Young Investigator Award winner

Alexandre Grondin

Alexandre Grondin is currently at the end of the second year of his PhD studies in the laboratory of Biochemistry and Molecular Physiology of Plants in the group of Dr Christophe Maurel at Montpellier, France. The Groups on plant aquaporin function and regulation in response to different stresses in the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana. Before he joined this group, Alexandre studied general biology for two years at the University of La Réunion, on Reunion Island. With the objective to train in plant biology, he came to Montpellier, where he obtained a bachelor and a masters degree in Plant Functional Biology at the University of Montpellier II. During his masters degree, he completed two training periods of 4 and 6 months in the Aquaporin group of Dr Maurel. Under the supervision of Dr Lionel Verdoucq, a senior researcher in the group, he studied the gating of the plant aquaporin AtPIP2;1 using a structure-function analysis. This work was published in the Biochemical Journal (Verdoucq et al., 2008, 415, 409-416).

In 2007, he received a three-year scholarship from the French Research Ministry that enabled his to continue his work on his PhD thesis. The data on the structure-function study of AtPIP2;1, for which he received the Biochemical Journal Poster Prize at the Phoenix Symposium at the at the University of Glasgow (25-27 June), have formed the basis for investigating the role of plant aquaporin gating in response to different stresses during his PhD studies.