Isabel María Fortes graduated in Biology from the University of Malaga (UMA) in 2002 and obtained her PhD from UMA with an FPI fellowship at the Institute for Subtropical and Mediterranean Horticulture "La Mayora" (IHSM-UMA-CSIC) under the supervision of Professor Jesús Navas Castillo (2010). She studied the tomato chlorosis virus (a whitefly-transmitted virus), focusing on its epidemiology, pathology, genetic diversity, and the development of efficient plant infection systems using cloned viral genomes. Between 2010 and 2013, she continued working in Jesús Navas Castillo's group as a postdoctoral researcher. Since 2014, she has been part of Professor Enrique Moriones's group at IHSM-UMA-CSIC, studying whitefly-transmitted viruses affecting tomato and cucurbit crops. Her research focuses on epidemiology, genetic diversity, and plant-virus interaction in the context of single and mixed infections, as well as understanding tomato resistance to whitefly-transmitted viruses to improve disease control.

Dr. Luis Díaz Martínez is a bioinformatician at the Supercomputing and Bioinnovation Center (SCBI) of the University of Málaga (UMA), specializing in genomics, transcriptomics, and microbial evolution. He develops and optimizes bioinformatics pipelines for analyzing omics data, focusing on viral quasispecies, bacterial adaptation, and plant-virus interactions. He obtained his PhD in 2016 from UMA, where he studied the evolutionary dynamics of RNA viruses under mutagenesis. As a postdoctoral researcher in Microbiology, he investigated rapid genetic adaptation in Bacillus subtilis biofilms and their impact on plant-microbe interactions. Dr. Díaz has published in high-impact journals on RNA virus mutagenesis, bacterial biofilms, and plant microbiomes. He has expertise in high-performance computing, computational genomics, and genome annotation. He regularly participates in scientific congresses and teaches courses on genome assembly, annotation, and evolutionary analysis. A member of the Spanish Society for Virology and the Spanish Society for Bioinformatics and Computational Biology, he actively integrates computational and experimental approaches to advance virology, microbial genomics, and bioinformatics.

Enrique Moriones holds a degree in Agricultural Engineering (1986) and a PhD in Agronomy (1991) from the Polytechnic University of Madrid. Between 1991 and 1995, he led the Plant Virology Group at the Institute for Agrofood Research and Technology (IRTA) in Barcelona. In 1995, he joined the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) as a Senior Scientist at the “La Mayora” Experimental Station, where he was promoted to Scientific Researcher in 2003 and to Research Professor in 2008. His research has been key to the study of viruses that affect high-value horticultural crops, particularly tomatoes. Of particular note is his fundamental role in the creation and consolidation of the Institute of Subtropical and Mediterranean Horticulture ’La Mayora’, a joint center between the CSIC and the University of Malaga (UMA). As director of the “La Mayora” Experimental Station (2007-2010) and, subsequently, of the “La Mayora” IHSM (2010-2022), he was a central figure in all aspects of the project, from its initial conception to its inauguration. In the field of scientific management and consulting, he served as a Scientific Advisor in the Crop Protection Area of the Interministerial Commission for Science and Technology (CICYT). He was also Deputy Coordinator of the Agricultural Sciences Area at the National Agency for Evaluation and Prospective Research, and he actively participated in scientific prospective panels that defined agricultural research priorities in state plans.

Ana Grande-Pérez is a Full Professor in Genetics at the University of Malaga (UMA) since 2024. She completed her PhD (1998) in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at the University of Santiago de Compostela, studying the interaction of reoviruses with their host cells. From 1995 to 1998, she completed several predoctoral stays at the Department of Microbiology at Lund University (Sweden). From 1999 to 2003, she conducted research at the School of Medicine, University of Manchester (United Kingdom), investigating a new antiviral therapy, lethal mutagenesis, based on viral evolution. In 2003, she returned to Spain to continue her research at the Severo Ochoa Center for Molecular Biology (Madrid). In 2005, she joined the UMA as a researcher in the “Ramón y Cajal” program of excellence, where she initiated a new line of research on in vivo lethal mutagenesis in a plant model. In 2010 she became an Associate Professor at the UMA and a researcher at the “La Mayora” Institute of Subtropical and Mediterranean Horticulture (IHSM-UMA-CSIC). She has been principal investigator on research projects under the Spanish National Plan, the Government of Andalusia, and the PAIDI BIO-264 “Agricultural Systems Biotechnology” group. Her current research focuses on the study of the evolution of quasispecies in emerging RNA and single-stranded DNA viruses, their diversity in different hosts, and the mechanisms that introduce genetic variability into the viral genome.