Welcome

Trained as a molecular microbiologist in Madrid and the U.S. (1999), she later specialized in bioinformatics and computational biology, working in several U.S. labs from 1999 to 2003. This includes a NASA-NSCORT fellowship at UCSD in R.F. Doolittle's lab and research in Adam Godzik's lab in La Jolla, CA. Between 2003 and 2006, she continued her work in Spain, holding a Marie Curie fellowship at the CNB-CSIC in the group led by Alfonso Valencia.

In 2006, she joined CNIO as a staff scientist and established her independent group in 2009 at the former IMPPC in Badalona. In 2013, she moved her group to the Institute of Biomedicine of Seville and later to the Andalusian Center for Developmental Biology (CABD) in Seville in 2018.

She has been Track Chair of the ISCB Function COSI since 2024, is a founding member of the Spanish Society of Computational Biology (SEBIBiC) founded in 2020, and serves on the executive committee of CSIC's BCBHub network for computational biologists (2023), among different commissions.

Her current research interests focus on understanding the relationships between sequence, structure, and function, particularly focusing on the multifunctional aspects of proteins relevant to biotechnology (biosensors) and biomedicine (therapeutic drugs) through AI-based techniques. She is also involved with the ENIA Chair at USE-Google Spain for AI.

In the past, she worked as a forensic biologist, bird watcher, and field microbiologist. She has named a bacterial species, Erwinia toletana sp. nov.

Her research has made a dual impact—advancing fundamental scientific knowledge while exploring biomedical applications. With deep expertise in protein family analysis, she was the first to analyze RIKEN sequences related to apoptosis, providing key insights into the mechanisms of NLR proteins, and identifying novel members of the RAS protein family within a comparative and evolutionary framework of small GTPases.

Her collaborations with experimental groups include identifying target proteins involved in HIV infection and contributing to recent studies on the multifunctionality of nuclear receptor families, particularly the glucocorticoid receptor (GR), and the and androgen receptor (AR), as well as oncoproteins that hold great potential for with significant potential for identifying therapeutic targets. Notably, her discovery of a new DNA repair pathway in bacteria offers promising therapeutic strategies for combating antibiotic resistance. Her contribution on the bacterial origin of sterols has also shed light on one of the most debated topics in the origin of eukaryotes.

On the computational side, her team has developed tools for data integration and transcriptomic analysis, and is working on methods to predict protein multifunctionality.

Their recent work on benchmarking protein language models functional annotation is among the first to further address large-scale annotation for non-model organisms.