Mayra Osorio has joined the EMBL-EBI Gene Expression Team for her CABANA secondment. Hosted by Dr Irene Papatheodorou, Mayra’s project is to characterise and compare the phenotypic response to water deficit stress of two cocoa genotypes with contrasting physiological behaviour to this kind of stress. Using a transcriptomic approach (RNAseq), she expects to develop analysis pipelines for differential expression analysis of transcriptomic data, coexpression and regulatory network modelling, and comparative transcriptomics. This knowledge should benefit breeding programs and contribute to enhance yield, sustainability and welfare around cocoa cropping.
Mayra is on secondment from the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, Colombia, where she is a PhD student in the Plant and Crop Biology lab of the Department of Biology.