  We consider several solutions of supergravity with reduced supersymmetry
which are related to wrapped branes, and elaborate on their geometrical and
physical interpretation. The Killing spinors are computed for each
configuration. In particular, all the known metrics on the conifold and all G_2
holonomy metrics with cohomogeneity one and S^3xS^3 principal orbits are
constructed from D=8 gauged supergravity in a unified formalism. The addition
of 4-form fluxes piercing the unwrapped directions is also considered. We also
study the problem of finding kappa-symmetric D5-probes in the so-called
Maldacena-Nunez model. Some of these solutions are related to the addition of
flavor to the dual gauge theory. We match our results with some known features
of N=1 SQCD with a small number of flavors and compute its meson mass spectrum.
Moreover, the gravity solution dual to three dimensional N=1 gauge theory,
solutions related to branes wrapping hyperbolic spaces, Spin(7) holonomy
metrics and SO(4) twistings in D=7 gauged sugra are studied in the last
chapter.
