At INTA, Carla is enrolled in the Sunflower Genomics Group, which seeks to apply and integrate the concepts and technologies of genomics to assist crop breeding. During her PhD, she genetically characterised and fingerprinted a sunflower breeding collection and conducted an association mapping study for crop quantitative disease resistance. As a postdoc, she is working on the identification and characterisation of functional genetic variations associated with fungal disease resistance in sunflower, through population approaches such as genome-wide association studies and expression quantitative trait loci (eQTL) mapping. Carla is also a biostatistics teaching assistant at Moreno National University. 

Project summary

As a CABANA fellow, Carla was part of the Ensembl Plants team at EMBL-EBI. Her project involved conducting population genomics and genetic diversity studies (combining the data produced during her PhD and postdoc with sunflower dataset available from public databases), as well as the genome-wide identification and characterisation of genes encoding disease resistance proteins, for potential crop improvement. 

Project outcomes and impact