Maria Del Rosario Valenti is a PhD student in the Department of Molecular Genetics at the Weizmann Institute of Science, under the supervision of Prof. Maya Schuldiner. She studies the roles of uncharacterized enzymes in the model organism Saccharomyces cerevisiae and how different enzymes work cohesively to give rise to metabolism. She completed her BSc and MSc at the University of Buenos Aires, Argentina.
In her PhD work, Rosario combines systematic genetics, protein engineering, and untargeted metabolomics to uncover the cellular roles of uncharacterized enzymes. Her research focuses on how enzyme loss perturbs metabolic networks and how cells adapt to these perturbations at the molecular level. She also develops functional assays to biochemically validate novel enzymatic activities. Currently, she is investigating metabolic plasticity using time-resolved metabolomics, with the goal of linking enzymatic function to cellular fitness and adaptation mechanisms.