Juan Fontana

Biography

Juan Fontana is a CSIC Senior Research Scientist (Investigador Científico) and has over 20 years’ experience employing electron microscopy focused on unravelling the structure of virus, virus-host interactions and macromolecules.

Juan graduated in Biochemistry at the Universidad Autónoma of Madrid in 2003. During his PhD (2004 – 2009), in the lab of Cristina Risco (National Centre for Biotechnology, Madrid, Spain), he characterised the replication complexes of Bunyamwera and rubella viruses. This work allowed him to elucidate the mechanisms by which viral macromolecular complexes interact with cellular components to create viral factories and to propose novel working models for each replication complex. As a post-doc (2009 – 2016), with Alasdair Steven (National Institutes of Health, USA) he worked on enveloped virus entry and morphogenesis. For example, he analysed the structural intermediates of influenza virus hemagglutinin and M1 matrix proteins prior to viral fusion; and he studied HIV morphogenesis and how this process can be blocked by different drugs and mutations. In 2016 he started his independent laboratory as a University Academic Fellow at the University of Leeds, and he became an Associate Professor in 2021. He then joined the Basque Center for Biophysics (Biofisika), CSIC, UPV/EHU in 2024.

As a PI, Juan has: 1) uncovered the molecular basis and the structural consequences of the K+ requirement for bunyavirus entry; 2) characterised the structure of Bunyamwera virus ribonucleoproteins; and 3) structurally characterised heterogeneous ribosomes isolated from different D. melanogaster tissues.