Short Bio

Mariela Pérez – Cárdenas obtained her bachelor degree in Biotechnology at Universidad de las Fuerzas Armadas (ESPE) in Ecuador. She worked in a third level hospital in the molecular biology department. She earned experience in: HLA typing, detection and quantification of HIV, HBV, HCV, CMV, EBV; early detection of sepsis in newborns and intensive care patients; BCR-ABL fusion transcript quantification.

She did her master studies in Bioinformatics and Systems Biology at University of Manchester in United Kingdom. She worked in two research projects during her master, the first one under the supervision of Gino Poulin, PhD. was to analyse genetic mutants that target components of the Mixed Lineage Leukaemia (MLL) complex in C. elegans to identify shared and specific functions affected in the transcriptome using bioinformatics.  The second one, under the supervision of Professor Simon Lovell, PhD., was to study the structure of the V3 loop region of HIV-1 to model the gp120 protein using a combination of data-based related and de novo prediction algorithms in Rosetta.

Currently, she works at Yachay Tech University in the School of Biological Sciences and Engineering.   Her current research focuses in molecular virology, molecular technologies to study human diseases.   She is also interested in immune responses in autoimmunity and in chronic infectious diseases.

Summary of interests

• Molecular biology
• Molecular virology
• Bioinformatics
• Molecular diagnostics of human diseases
• Protein modelling

Teaching

• General Biology 1
• General Biology 2

Selected Publications

Galarza, J. M., Barquera, R., Tito, A. M., Hernández, D. I., Pérez, M., Tamayo, A., … Grijalva, M. (2018). Human Immunology Genetic diversity of the HLA system in human populations from the Sierra ( Andean ), Oriente ( Amazonian ) and Costa ( Coastal ) regions of Ecuador. Human Immunology, 79(9), 639–650. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.humimm.2018.06.004