Echeverria Chagas, Natalia Paola

Research interests

Due to the difficulty of culturing Hepatitis C virus (HCV) in the laboratory, some aspects of its biology are not fully elucidated. That is why I have decided to focus on the translational biology of this virus, and since my PhD, I have been studying different natural variants of the HCV IRES and their implication for both translational efficiency and viral evolution. Also, together with a Master's student, we have promoted the work with infectious clones of this virus for the first time in our country. We have recently managed to produce this virus in the laboratory. This line of research on translational efficiency and the work with infectious clones of HCV are some of the main topics on which I am currently focused, and represent my first independent line of work in the laboratory.
In parallel, and pursuing a topic of great personal interest since my undergraduate training, I am starting my second independent research line (since the end of 2022) in the study of virulent bacteriophages against multidrug-resistant human pathogenic bacteria, a line in which a master's student joined under my guidance in 2023 and recently a graduate student. The spread of antimicrobial resistance in recent years is one of the major difficulties when choosing an effective treatment. This choice has become a challenge with the emergence of multidrug-resistant (MDR) pathogens as well as the ability of some of them to form biofilms. For these reasons, it has become necessary to look for alternative treatments, such as the use of bacteriophages (phages). Considering that to date this field is incredibly underexplored in our country, this line of research aims to isolate and characterize lytic phages with activity against various human pathogenic bacteria isolated in our country that present an MDR phenotype or are biofilm-forming, as a first approach to have a biobank of agents for the biocontrol of pathogens.