Research Interests
Research Interests
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I'm interested in morphological, ecological, physiological and evolutionary aspects of chemical defense in amphibians. Until today, my main focus has been in understanding how all these aspects relate in different lineages of frogs that are capable of sequestering alkaloids from their diet to use for their own defense against pathogens and predators—known as poison frogs.
Poison frogs are able to sequester alkaloids from their diet, that is composed mainly of ants, mites, beetles and milipedes. We know that they are able to store these compounds in specialized glands in their skin, but little is known about the mechanism to transport and to avoid self-intoxication from these compounds. The main question in my PhD project is to understand more about this mechanism and how that evolved among the superfamily Dendrobatoidea (Dendrobatidae + Aromobatidae).
The capacity of sequestering alkaloids independently evolved in different families of anurans. One of them are the South American poison toads from the family Bufonidae, the Melanophryniscus.
They are incredible toads that are characterized by their red bellies.
In addition to alkaloids sequestered from their diet, they also have synthesized compounds that are typical of bufonid toads, such as bufotenine and bufadienolides (Click here to read our article). That makes them a super interesting group to study chemical defense!
One of the techniques that I learned while still in undergrad was histology. More often than I expected, this skill has been very useful for the research projects I was involved in.
For example, in my masters project I used skeletocronology method (it's like counting the lines of growth in a tree trunk) to determine individual ages and relate it to individual quantity and diversity of alkaloids in the skin.
As a result, age explains the richness of the alkaloids found in the skin. That is: the older you are, the more diverse are the items you have ate in your life, so higher are the chances of eating different arthropods with different alkaloids. See the paper about this here.
Because we know so little about the sequestration mechanism, I am also interested in methods that allow us to identify the tissues and organs that these alkaloids are present. Different methods of chromatography and mass spectrometry are widely used to detect and identify the alkaloids in the poison frog's body. Recently, we published a paper about the use of Mass Spectrometry Imaging to map the distribution of alkaloids in a whole body sectioning of Dendrobates tinctorius. Click here to check out our article.
I am also interested in Evolution, Herpetology and Chemical Ecology as a whole.
I have been collaborating with several colleagues on different aspects of herps like taxonomy, systematics and chemical communication of amphibians and lizards.
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