María de Toro

My scientific career started just finishing my Chemistry degree at Universidad de La Rioja (Spain) in 2006 (2006-2007), when I obtained a fellowship to study methicillin resistance mechanisms among Staphylococcus aureus isolates from neonatal patients. After that, I started a master’s degree in Biochemistry at Universidad de Zaragoza (Spain), where I was also working as visiting student as the Respiratory Tract Infections Department at Hospital Clínico Universitario Lozano Blesa. Those provide to me a wide experience working with multi-resistant Mycobacterium tuberculosis isolates.

I started my PhD in 2008, thanks to a predoctoral fellowship from the Spanish Health Ministry, working on the genetic characterization of Salmonella enterica isolates from human, animal and food origin. My work was mostly focused on mobile genetic elements involved on antibiotic and virulence resistance among S. enterica isolates, as well as its temporal stability in the absence of antibiotic pressure. This work provided me with a great background on microbial genetics and molecular biology techniques. It also gave to me the opportunity to work as PhD visitor at two external laboratories: at the Bundesinstitut für Risikobewertung (Berlin, Germany) and Universidad de Oviedo (Oviedo, Spain).

After obtaining my PhD (April 2013) I moved to the Intergenomics Group at Instituto de Biomedicina y Biotecnología de Cantabria (IBBTEC, Santander, Spain) to participate in two European Projects (PLASWIRES and EvoTAR). The first one, studying plasmids as wires to build genetic circuits and to characterize genetic signals as electric pulses. The second one, was mainly focused on the genetic evolution of antibiotic resistant pathogens, the role of plasmids and other related mobile genetic elements, and the development of bioinformatic techniques to track its evolution. Both projects, linked to the group expertise, gave me the opportunity to work at international level and to develop strong bioinformatic skills (programming in different languages, statistics and sequencing techniques). That was the starting point to my current position.

Since January 2016, I am currently working as bioinformatician at the Genomics & Bioinformatics Core Facility at Centro de Investigación Biomédica de La Rioja (CIBIR, Logroño, Spain). This Facility aim to support other researchers (both from our center or from external ones) to develop their projects in terms of massive sequencing and bioinformatic requirements. With this aim, my work involves developing and implementing new pipelines such as de novo sequencing, resequencing, transcriptomic or metagenomics analysis, adapting these protocols to researcher requisites and offering “custom” solutions.