Mariana Sottomayor (MS) is a Professor at the Department of Biology from the Faculty of Sciences of the University of Porto (FCUP), where she teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in Cell Biology, Plant Physiology, Plant Molecular Biology and Plant Metabolic Engineering, and a researcher at the group PLANTBIO from the Research Centre in Biodiversity and Genetic Resources (CIBIO). MS has worked most of her research life with an amazing plant that is the source of the first natural agents used in anticancer chemotherapy - Catharanthus roseus (Madagascar periwinkle). This plant accumulates in its leaves extremely low levels of anticancer alkaloids and has become a model for the study of plant specialized metabolism. During her PhD, MS investigated the biochemical bases of a key biosynthetic step of the anticancer alkaloids between the Department of Botany from the University of Toronto, Canada, and the Department of Plant Physiology from the University of Murcia, Spain. After her PhD, MS continued her research in the anticancer alkaloid metabolism of C. roseus at Institute for Molecular and Cell Biology (IBMC) University of Porto, where she headed the research group Bioactive Natural Products. During this period, her group made important contributions in the field of plant specialized metabolism, including the biochemical and molecular characterization of important components of the C. roseus alkaloid pathway, and the implementation of several omic strategies to unravel untapped biosynthetic, transport and regulatory genes of the pathway. In the end of 2015, MS joined CIBIO to embrace the project of developing the field of Plant Biology in this institution from scratch. Since then, her work with C. roseus has slowed down, involving mainly bioinformatics approaches, leading recently to the characterization of the alkaloid and transcriptome profiles of C. roseus leaf idioblasts, with important breakthroughs concerning the architecture of the anticancer alkaloid pathway. At CIBIO, MS has been committed in the central goal of the PLANTBIO group: the use of the advanced knowledge and skills in PLANT BIOLOGY of the group, together with CIBIO expertise in GENOMICS, BIOINFORMATICS and BIODIVERSITY, to harness the potential of crop biodiversity and wild relatives to face the challenges of yield, sustainability, and competitiveness. This has involved work concerning the agrobiodiversity of Portuguese grapevine and tomato varieties, of the valuable collection of cultivars of coffee plants harboured by the Centro de Investigação das Ferrugens do Cafeeiro (CIFC), and of the highly resilient Nepalese diversity of the golden crop Amaranth. In those projects, the expertise of MS in specialized metabolism is particularly relevant in what concerns the identification of the molecular determinants and improvement of organoleptic and nutraceutical properties of plant food, as well as for the reduction of toxic and anti-nutritional factors. More recently, MS has become involved in the investigation of the developmental singularities of the periderm from the economically important cork oak (Quercus suber), and in the ex situ conservation of plant species from Portugal native forests, with a special focus in the menaced dwarf oak native to Portugal, Q. lusitanica. Following a major concern of kiwifruit growers in the north of Portugal, concerning the dependence of this species in chilling accumulation hours to achieve release of bud dormancy, MS has now decided to investigate the intricate signaling and metabolic network involved in the regulation of endodormancy in kiwifruit. The goal is to deeply understand the dormancy developmental transitions in kiwifruit, the metabolites and signals involved, to formulate an innocuous treatment that, when applied in the right developmental /environmental moment, will enable to break dormancy efficiently and homogeneously, enabling growers to face the menacing impacts of climate change.