© SHANNON O'HARADuring Mauro Costa-Mattioli’s childhood in rural Uruguay, the government was transitioning from fascism to democracy. “At the time it was very difficult to pursue science,” he says. Yet he fell in love with biology, and throughout his elementary school years, as a military government ruled the country, Costa-Mattioli spent his time dissecting plants and animals and staring into a microscope. He continued to study microbiology as an undergrad at the University of the Republic in Montevideo, and when he saw the opportunity to go abroad to pursue graduate work, Costa-Mattioli left for France to study the genomic strategies viruses deploy to escape immune attack. (See “Viral Virtuosos")
His PhD research at the University of Nantes sparked an interest in learning more about translation, given that viruses can suppress protein production in hosts to usurp cellular machinery for their own gains. This curiosity led him to a postdoc in Nahum Sonenberg’s lab at McGill University in Montreal. Upon relocating to Canada, Costa-Mattioli heard a talk by Nobel laureate Eric Kandel discussing the as-yet-unknown role of protein synthesis in memory formation. Costa-Mattioli was intrigued and decided that working out the mechanisms of such a phenomenon would help him carve out a niche in the translation world. “And I was in the best lab in the world to develop this project,” he says. The only problem? “We didn’t know anything about neuroscience,” adds Sonenberg.
Costa-Mattioli ...
