María Ávila-Arcos
Mexico

María Ávila-Arcos is an Assistant Professor at the International Laboratory for Human Genome Research in the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). She completed her undergraduate studies in GenomicSciences at UNAM and later a obtained her doctorate degree in palaeogenomics at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark. She subsequently did a postdoc in population genetics at Stanford University. Her work has focused on the analysis of ancient genomes from a variety of species, including plants, viruses, animals, and humans. She has also studied the DNA of various present-day and ancient populations of the territory that is today Mexico to learn about their demographic and evolutionary history.  Her current research interests turn around how the genomes of the Mexican populations have changed, as well as of various pathogens that have infected them, over time. She investigates this using ancient and modern DNA. She also develops pioneering work in the characterization of the African genetic component of the Afro-Mexican population. The work of Dr. Ávila Arcos has contributed to the understanding of demographic and adaptive processes that have given rise to the genetic diversity of the populations of Mexico. In addition, her work on ancient pathogens has traced the routes of entry of some pathogenic bacteria and viruses to Mexican territory during European colonization.

Terry Gaasterland
USA

Coming soon.

Rodrigo A. Gutierrez
Chile

Dr. Gutiérrez is Full Professor and past Chair at the Department of Molecular Genetics and Microbiology, and current Research DIrector at the School of Biological Sciences of the P. Universidad Católica de Chile. Deputy Director of the Millennium Institute for Integrative Biology and Principal Investigator at the FONDAP Center for Genome Regulation. He has received several awards and honors during his career, including the Howard Hughes Medical Institute International Early Career Scientist award, John A. Boezi Memorial Alumnus Award from Michigan State University and the Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Research Award of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. He is one of the founders of the Chilean Society of Plant Biologists and was the first elected president.

Dr. Gutiérrez’s interest is to use systems biology approaches to understand mechanisms to regulate gene expression in response to nitrogen nutrients or metabolite signals in plants using A. thaliana as a model system. He pioneered the combined use of classical experimental biology, functional genomics and bioinformatics approaches to unravel molecular mechanisms of plant form and function. He created tools that facilitate data integration and analysis and enable plant systems biology research. By iteratively combining bioinformatics tools with functional genomics and classical molecular genetics approaches he and his team discovered important molecular mechanisms plants utilize to respond to changes in nitrogen (N) nutrient availability using Arabidopsis as a model system. This is essential for developing strategies that intervene in molecular networks for biotechnological purposes such as improving N use efficiency in plants or modifying the amino acid content of seeds, which are important issues for health, agriculture and human nutrition. It is of paramount importance for modern agriculture to improve crop N use efficiency as world population, food needs and crop use diversification (e.g. for biofuel production) will continue to increase.

Plant life at the extremes in the Atacama Desert
Throughout evolution, plants adapted to flourish in a variety of ecosystems, including extreme deserts. In the current changing climate scenario, it is essential to identify the underlying molecular mechanisms that enable plant resilience extreme conditions. The Atacama Desert, the driest non-polar desert in the world, offers a unique opportunity to explore plant adaptations to extreme environmental conditions. We characterized the three pristine and extreme ecosystems along a natural altitudinal gradient of environmental parameters on the western Andes slopes in the Atacama Desert. We recorded low and unpredictable precipitation patterns, large daily temperature oscillations, low humidity, extremely high radiation levels, as well as soils with consistently low nitrogen levels. Despite these harsh conditions, a diversity of plant species coexist. We sequenced the transcriptome of the 32 most important plant species, representing 14 plant families with diverse phylogenetic origins. Using phylogenomics, we compared the protein-coding sequences of these 32 Atacama species to their 32 closest available sequenced species, and found 265 genes under positive selection in Atacama plants versus their non adapted “sister” species. These genes are involved in various developmental, regulatory and metabolic processes associated with environmental adaptation. We chose a set of positive selected genes and based the available functional characterization of their Arabidopsis orthologs we exemplify their potential role in the adaptation of plants to the extreme Atacama Desert. Our study provides new insights into plant abiotic stress tolerance, and improves our understanding of the highly unique, undisturbed Atacama Desert ecosystem.

João Carlos Setubal
Brazil

João Carlos Setubal is a Professor at the University of São Paulo, Brazil, Department of Biochemistry. Dr. Setubal received his B.Eng. from the University of São Paulo and his PhD degree in Computer Science from the University of Washington, USA. Before joining the University of São Paulo, Dr. Setubal was on the faculty of the State University of Campinas, Brazil (1986-2005) and Virginia Tech, USA (2004-2011). Dr. Setubal's research focuses on the development and use of computational tools for the analysis of omics data, with a focus on microbial genomics. Personal website: http://www.iq.usp.br/setubal/index-en.html

Hunting for species and genera in metagenome datasets
Nowadays there are thousands of metagenome datasets from all kinds of environments and hosts, a prime example being the human gut. When these datasets are based on shotgun (total DNA) sequences, it is possible to learn much about the species present on any given dataset. This is usually done with general-purpose taxonomic classification programs. In this talk I explore a related problem: given a species or genus of interest, we would like to know where such organisms can be found among the thousands of available datasets. An answer to such a question might be useful, for example, to correlate presence of a species of interest and metadata features. It turns out that using a general-purpose taxonomic classifier to address this problem may not be as effective as a more refined approach. I will present preliminary results of such an approach, which has a lower rate of false positives.

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Morgane Thomas-Chollier
France

Coming soon.