Pedro Moreno Tovar

Doctor in Biology
University of Houston
TX, USA, 2004

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Pedro worked in molecular biology, researching genes and antigenic proteins of M. tuberculosis and M. leprae with diagnostic and immunogenic potential. Subsequently, he gained experience in the study of breast cancer*, human genetics, and fractal geometry. Later, he transitioned to the emerging fields of genomics and bioinformatics. He collaborated in formulating a scalar theory that explains the population repertoires of cells in the humoral immune response (Burgos and Moreno-Tovar, 1996) and was a pioneer in applying multifractal analysis to the study of DNA sequences arranged in the chaos game representation (Gutiérrez et al., 1998). Additionally, Pedro served as coordinator for the Dpto. of Valle del Cauca of the GeBiX Project of Excellence from 2008 to 2014, focusing on the analysis of metagenomes of extreme environments. Subsequently, between 2015 and 2020, he coordinated the SGR of Valle del Cauca project on breast cancer.

*Note: Pedro's collaboration on breast cancer was part of Patricia E. Vélez's Summa Cum Laude master's thesis in genetics, which validated the use of tamoxifen for breast cancer patients in Colombia. Since then, thousands of women in the country have benefited from this research.

Pedro is currently working on identifying biological problems that can be addressed with computer tools, mainly using databases, mathematics, geometry and statistics to study the structural and functional organization of genes, genomes and omics profiles. His main interests are: developing algorithms and applications (software) aimed at answering questions that account for the emergent properties that characterize life.

• Moreno PA. (2004). Large scale and small scale bioinformatics studies on the Caenorhabditis elegans genome. Doctoral thesis. University of Houston. Houston, TX, USA. 1-216.
• Kirt Martin, Janet L. Siefert, Yue Lu, Pedro A. Moreno, William R. Widger and George E. Fox. (2003). Cyanobacterial signature genes. Photosynthesis Research. 75: 211 – 221.
• Moreno PA, Rodríguez JG, Vélez PE, Cubillos JR, Del Portillo P. (2002). La genómica aplicada en salud humana. Colombia Ciencia y Tecnología. Colciencias. Jul-Sep. 20:14-21.
• Hilton MJ, Gutiérrez L, Zhang L, Moreno PA, Reddy M, Brown N, Tan Y, Hill A, Wells DE. (2001). An integrated physical map of 8q22-q24: use in positional cloning and deletion analysis of Langer-Giedion syndrome. Genomics. 71(2):192-9.
• Fox GE, Moreno PA, Zhang Z, Hurry J. (2000). Novel Technology for Microbial Monitoring. 2000 Annual Report Environmental Institute of Houston, P 7-8.
• Soto CY, Moreno PA, Valencia JT, Bernal MM, Guzmán F, Patarroyo MP, Murillo LA. (1999). Isolation, characterization, molecular cloning and amplification of a species-specific M. leprae antigen. Int. J. Lepr. Other Mycobact. Dis. 67(4):392-402.
• Gutiérrez JM, Iglesias A, Rodríguez MA, Burgos JD, Moreno PA. (1998). Analyzing the multifractal structure of DNA nucleotide sequences. Chaos and Noise in Biology and Medicine. World Scientific Publishing. England, 315 - 319.
• Burgos JD, Estévez CM, Moreno P, Rodríguez J, Verdugo A. (1996). Geometría fractal en biología molecular e inmunología. Rev. Cient. UNINCCA. 2 (2): 17-25.
• Javier D. Burgos and Pedro Moreno-Tovar. (1996). Zipf scaling behavior in the immune system. BioSystem. 39:227-232. ISSN:0303-2647.
• Rodríguez E, Moreno PA, (1988). Construcción de una genoteca de ADN-Recombinante para el aislamiento de clonos de genes del Mycobacterium tuberculosis. Tesis de pregrado en biología – Mención: meritoria. Universidad Nacional de Colombia. Bogotá, DC.

• Patricia E. Vélez and Pedro A. Moreno Editores. (2007). Memorias (Memories). The 2nd international seminar on genomics, proteomics, bioinformatics, and systems biology – 2006. Editorial Universidad del Cauca. Popayán. ISBN: 978-958-9451-21-2. Págs, 224 págs. (Conference paper)
• Pedro A. Moreno, Patricia E. Vélez y Javier D. Burgos (2007). Biología Molecular, Genómica y Post-Genómica. Pioneros, principios y tecnologías. Incluye referencias a Colombia. Editorial Universidad del Cauca. Segunda edición. Popayán. 298 págs. ISBN: 958-33-5118-0. (Book)
• Morfolia: Revista de la Universidad Nacional de Colombia (Equipo Editorial)
• Patricia E. Vélez, Pedro A. Moreno (Conference Editors) (2018)(Selected articles from the IV Colombian Congress on Bioinformatics and Computational Biology & VIII International Conference on Bioinformatics SoIBio 2017. BMC Genomics 19, Suppl 8. Pages;: 92. Editor Springer-Nature/)