In Brief

I’m a master’s student in genetics with two main interests: First, the study of tropical marine ecosystem’s diversity through molecular techniques and, second, the study of host - microbe interactions and their impact in evolution trajectories.

Currently, I'm studying the bacterial community that coexists with the algae holobiont Gracilaria chilensis. In this context, I'm focused on assessing the effects of domestication in this bacteriota in terms of diversity, composition and structure. At the same time, diving on the functional potential of this microbial community looking for metabolic capabilities, previosly published in literature, as key for the seaweed - microbe interaction.

Previously, I have worked applying eDNA techniques to study the composition of coral reefs at the Tropical Eastern Pacific (TEP) of Panama looking at coral and elasmobranch diversities.

ABOUT

Environmental DNA techniques consists in high-throughput sequencing for multitaxa identification using total and typically degraded DNA extracted from an environmental sample (Taberlet et al. 2012). When complemented with metabarcoding, marker genes are used to specify the taxa on study.

This techniques present different advantages (Adams et al. 2019), as:

Less invasive assessing and monitoring of ecosystems diversity.
Savings in sampling logistics and time on the field.
Helpfull for studying rare, cryptic and endangered species.

Here we use seawater samples coupled with ITS2 (Nichols & Marko 2019, Alexander et al. 2020, Dugal et al. 2021, West et al. 2021) and 12S (Miya et al. 2015) marker genes to investigate the coral and elasmobranch diversity that could be found through the lens of seawater from the Panama TEP reefs and estuaries.

To do the following:

Describe benthonic composition of Panama TEP reefs.
Ratify barcoding findings for Pocillopora species in this ecosystem.
Capture any else Pocillopora species that are present in the Panama TEP but could not be catch with the barcoding approach.
Determine shark and ray communities composition along the Panama TEP coasts.
Assess the existance of elasmobranch diversity hotspots in the Panama TEP.