Fitxa persona

Biologist (Catholic University of Chile, PUC), Doctor of Agricultural Sciences (PUC), with experience in the use of omic approaches to understand the development and metabolism of plants. Between 2009-2019 Postdoc at the Center for Research in Agricultural Genomics (CRAG). EMBO-Marie Curie Postdoctoral Scholar (2010-2012). Currently Hired Ramon y Cajal (Agriculture Area) at the Institute of Integrative Systems Biology (I2SysBio) as Principal Investigator.

Our lab (TOMSBio Lab) is interested in the transcriptional regulation of secondary metabolism. This has included genomic analyses of transcription factor families and global gene expression analyses, as well as an interest in systems biology approaches integrating transcriptomics and metabolomics datasets. The current focus of our Research group is the genome-wide study of gene regulatory networks that control phenylpropanoid, isoprenoid and cannabinoid metabolisms. We are interested in several plant species: fruit crops (e.g. grapevine and tomato) and also those holding potential pharmaceutical properties that make them important for drug discovery or necessary for improvement of functional foods. We are also developing plant cell lines as simplified models to study how to elicitate specialized metabolisms and to integrate metabolic and transcriptomics data to identify still-uncharacterized enzymatic steps of these pathways.