Luis Leal Garza

My research explores genomic information that sequencing alone cannot capture. While sequencing excels at reading DNA at base-pair resolution, it often misses larger structural variations (SVs) linked to diseases like cancer. I develop Optical Genome Mapping (OGM) methods that capture long DNA fragments to assemble genomes and detect SVs. Starting with bacteria and yeast, I’ve uncovered previously unmapped regions and refined our method. Now, we are working on adapting our OGM method for human genomes, aiming both to improve SV detection for cancer diagnostics and to reveal regions invisible to current techniques.