Staff

 

Verónica Perez-Luna

Verónica obtained his Ph.D. in Materials Sciences with Prof. Quintana-Ruiz. She is the lab technician in charge of the TEM facility. She is an expert in TEM analysis of biological and nanostructured samples.

 

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Postdoctoral fellows

 

Ignacio Lara-Hernández

Ignacio obtained his Ph.D. in Biomedical Sciences with Prof. Comas-Garcia. His thesis focused on understanding how the human respiratory syncytial virus modifies mitochondria using thin-section TEM and on how these alterations relate to the mechanism by which the virus escapes the immune response. Now, he is part of a CICSaB-wide project that aims to detect human pathogenic viruses in water treatment plants by molecular biology and TEM.s

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Ph.D. Students

 

Brianda Agundis-Tinajero

Brianda obtained her Engineering degree in biomedicine from the Science Department at UASLP. She is a Ph.D. student in the Life Science Graduate Program at the Science Department at UASLP. She is being co-tutored by Profs. Mauricio Comas-García and Aldo Mejía-Rodríguez. She is developing software based on Artificial intelligence to find and characterize damaged mitochondria in SARS-CoV-2-infected cells.

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Verónica Arellano-Cerda

Verónica is a Ph.D. student at the DICIM (Ph.D. in Engineering in Materials Sciences). She is being co-tutored by Profs. Mauricio Comas-García and Mildred Quintana-Ruiz. She is using a materials science approach to understand the mechanical properties of a CHIKV mutant in which we have removed interactions that induce steric repulsion between the glycoproteins. She should graduate by August/September 2026

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Andrea Castorena-Robles

Andrea obtained her Engineering degree in Bioprocesses from TIEMS and her M.Sc. in Molecular Biology from IPICyT. She is a Ph.D. student in the Life Science Graduate Program in the Science Department at UASLP and is working to understand the electrostatic interactions between CHIKV E1 and E2 that govern assembly and disassembly. She is currently tutored by Prof. Comas-Garcia.

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Miguel Ángel Coronado-Ipiña.

Miguel obtained his M.Sc. in Life Sciences, studying interactions that drive CHIKV budding. He is a Ph.D. student in the Life Science Graduate Program in the Science Department at UASLP, and now he is dissecting the E2-E2 interactions that control the assembly and disassembly of CHIKV. He is currently tutored by Prof. Comas-Garcia.

 

 

 

M.Sc. Students

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Libertad M. Nieto-Espinosa

Libertad obtained his B.Sc. in Biology at the Science  Department at UASLP. She is currently an M.Sc. student in the Basic Biomedical Research Program at the Medical School. Her thesis project focuses on determining whether CHIKV mutants with reduced infectivity and abnormal virions elicit a less inflammatory response than the attenuated CHIKV 181/25 strain. She is studying the immunological properties of these mutants using PBMCs. This project is a collaboration with immunologists Prof. Adriana Monsivaís-Urenda and Dr. Elena Martínez-Shio (co-adviser).

 

 

Undergraduate Students

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Paola Córdova-Reyes

Paola is a senior Farmacobiological Chemistry student in the Chemical Science Department at UASLP. She is currently working on understanding the packaging signal of CHIKV. This is a collaboration with Dr. Mayra Colunga-Saucedo (first Ph.D. student in the group).

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Leslie P. Lugo-Herrejón

Leslie is a senior Biology student in the Science Department at UASLP. She is currently working on an ultrastructural project on the gut of mice with an autism-like syndrome. This is a collaboration with Prof. Roberto C. Salgado Delgado.

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Edgar Mota-Medina

Edgar is a senior Biology student in the Science Department at UASLP. He is currently trying to understand how mutations in CHIKV CP affect the fidelity of virion assembly.

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W. Carolina Piña-Ruiz

Carolina is a junior Biology student in the Science Department at UASLP. She is currently performing a bioinformatic analysis of alphavirus capsid proteins and site-directed mutagenesis to understand the assembly of alphavirus cores. She has published one article on the structural features of the early divergence of the Alphavirus core.

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Daniel Perez-Reez

Daniel is a senior Biology student in the Science Department at UASLP. He is using TEM to characterize the virome of the lora turtle (L. kempis). This is a collaboration with Prof. Vanessa Labrada-Martagon and Dr. Ignacio Lara-Hernández.

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Italia V. Rivera-Martínez

Italia is a freshman Biology student in the Science Department at UASLP. She is currently generating a rescue mutant of CHIKV that could alleviate some budding defects in a mutant with altered E2-E2 interactions.

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Diana Andrea Zuñiga-Izaguirre

Diana is a senior Bioprocesses Engineering student in the Chemical Science Department at UASLP. She is currently trying to understand how the mutations of CHIKV CP affect the fidelity of the virion assembly process.

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