After starting my career studying fish evolution, I have focused the later years specializing in the field of bioinformatics and parasite transcriptomics under the tutelage of Dr. Héctor Musto, Dr. Andrés Iriarte and Dr. Uriel Koziol.

Specifically, I’m interested in Spliced Leader (SL) Trans-Splicing in Plathelminths in relation to the evolution of parasitism, its description in the phylum, physiological functions and its evolutionary dynamics.

To this ends first focused on refining in a novel pipeline for Splice Leader detection, named SLFinder that allows the novel detection of SL sequences based only on abundance, location, and orientation in mRNA transcripts. Now I’m applying it to study in detail its usage on the cestode Hymenolepis microstoma, and plan to apply the gained information and knowledge in a comprehensive survey of SL trans-splicing in the entire phylum.

Selected publications

• J. Calvelo, H. Juan, H. Musto, U. Koziol, A. Iriarte, SLFinder, a pipeline for the novel identification of splice-leader sequences: A good enough solution for a complex problem, BMC Bioinformatics. 21 (2020) 293. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12859-020-03610-6.