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= Marcela Uliano da Silva = Marcela Uliano da Silva is a Brazilian computational biologist most known for her PhD thesis work on Limnoperna fortunei, an invasive species in South America. She research now focuses on modern sloths and how convergent evolution led to their suspensory behavior.

Early life and Education
Uliano-Silva was born as the second child to a salesman and a house in Criciúma, Brazil. In order to attend a top Brazilian university, the family saved money during her childhood so that she could attend private school. During her teenage years, Uliano-Silva enjoyed punk rock, history and social sciences. It was when her friend introduced her to the Discovery Channel, that a passion for biology sparked. This led her to decide to study molecular and cell biology in university.

For her undergraduate degree in biological science, Uliano-Silva attended Federal University of Santa Catarina. She then went on to get her masters and PhD at Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. Her masters was in transcriptome sequencing and assembly, molecular biology and bioinformatics and her PhD was in biophysics. During her doctoral program, she was mentored by Dr. Mauro Rebelo, a professor at Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. Her PhD program ended with her defending her thesis titled "Sequencing, assembly and annotation of the mitochondrial and nuclear genomes of the invading mussel Limnoperna fortunei" which was later published as a manuscript.

Research and Career
During her time as a PhD candidate, Uliano-Silva worked on a project focused on eliminating an invasive species that is encroaching the Amazon River shores known as Limnoperna fortunei, or golden mussel. The golden mussel has caused damages to the river ecosystem, leading to a decrease in biodiversity, as well as has caused expense damages to water treatment facilities. In order to try and eradicate the species, Uliano-Silva began work on mapping the entire genome of the mussel, which could help to determine the species strengths and weakness that could be targeted. In 2014, she published "Gene Discovery through transcriptome sequencing for the invasive Mussel Limnoperna fortunei", the first published molecular profile for the species.

She continued work on this project, identifying specific characteristic in the mussel's genome that could give it an advantage as an invader. With this data, the goal is to inject the mussels with silencing RNAs that can identify and turn off the targeted survival genes. Then, the genetically modified mussels could be release to breed in the ecosystem, to ensure that the modification would be present in future generations and control the mussels' population. At the conclusion of her PhD research, Uliano-Silva successfully defended her thesis titled "Sequencing, assembly and annotation of the mitochondrial and nuclear genomes of the invading mussel Limnoperna fortunei". Her work was then published later that year in a paper titled "A hybrid-hierarchical genome assembly strategy to sequence the invasive golden mussel, Limnoperna fortunei", highlighting the pipeline she developed to assmble the first genome of the mussel.

After finishing her PhD work, Uliano-Silva accepted a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions postdoctoral fellowship at Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research in Berlin, Germany. Here, she started a new project as a member of the Vertebrate Genomes Project, a group that aims to compile genomes of all living vertebrate species. For her project, she is focusing on sequencing the genome of three sloth species native to South America, aiming to analyze the molecular mechanisms behind the convergent evolution of these animals which caused all sloths to lie suspended in trees. As of April 2021, Uliano-Silva was part of a published work called "Towards completed and error-free genome assemblies of all vertebrate species". This work presents the Vertebrate Genomes Project's observations and pipeline method for generating 16 species genome assemblies, concluding that long-read sequencing technologies are important for genome quality.

She is currently working as a bioinformatician at the Wellcome Sanger Institute in Cambridge, United Kingdom. She is also a TED fellow since 2014.