Our work on the evolution of the regulatory genome of echinoderms is now out in @natecoevo.nature.com. Led by my former PhD Marta Magri, Danila Voronov & Saoirse Foley. Great collaboration of Arnone, Hinman & Maeso labs, started long time ago with our missed José Luis Gomez-Skarmeta: rdcu.be/eXX8l
🚨Preprint from our lab🚨
How and when did TADs emerge during evolution? 🐁🐟🪰
HINT: the diversification of CTCF regulation and functions enabled new mechanisms of 3D chromatin folding 🧬
With Liene Astica & @rdacemel.bsky.social
Link:
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
Bluetorial 1/15👇
🧬🧬🧬
Very happy to share our new preprint led by Fede Mantica (@fedemantica.bsky.social) on how tissue-specific alternative splicing (TS-AS) and gene expression (TS-GE) evolve across bilaterians! Thread below 🧵 1/11
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
What happens when evolution adds an extra pair of eyes?
Male mayflies evolve an extra pair of dorsal compound eyes, the Turbanate eyes, thought to help males detect females during mating swarms.
we have investigate how this remarkable evolutionary novelty develops.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
Capolavoro 🎨 alert 🚨! What is the role of gene body methylation in invertebrates? Despite extensive speculation linking it to plasticity and environmental responses, its mechanistic effects and heritability remain unclear. Our take out in @natecoevo.nature.com: www.nature.com/articles/s41... 1/
Capolavoro 🎨 alert 🚨! What is the role of gene body methylation in invertebrates? Despite extensive speculation linking it to plasticity and environmental responses, its mechanistic effects and heritability remain unclear. Our take out in @natecoevo.nature.com: www.nature.com/articles/s41... 1/
Our preprint on the 'Origins of Eukaryotic Metabolism' is out! Take a look at some of the new findings on the origin of eukaryotic membranes, metabolic integrations between archaeal and bacterial ancestors, and other fascinating prokaryotic interactions during eukaryogenesis.
doi.org/10.64898/202...
Even more bizarrely, some retrotransposons encode DAMs, but also cytosine DNMTs and Chromo (histone reader) domains, we dub these guys EpiLTRs. Why on earth a TE needs a more complex epigenome than many classic eukaryotic model species (e.g. yeast or flies) boggles us, but hard to explore yet. 5/
New preprint! In an fun collaboration with @imaeso.bsky.social and @mirimiam.bsky.social led by Manu F-M, we set to explore the potential adaptation of transposable elements 👾 to host adenine DNA methylation by recruiting prokaryotic DAM methyltransferases: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6.... 1/6
Thrilled to be part of this extraordinary set of groups of the #EvoDevOmics Network, and glad to see the interactions of my team with members of other labs. Great presentations by @alfonso233.bsky.social and @baielx.bsky.social of our lab projects on gene loss and genomics. #dissemination#outreach
Exhausted but extremely happy for the two past days of very exciting Science! The EvoDevOmics Spanish Network gathered together in BCN to discuss about evodevo & omics, lots of great talks, discussions and future collaborations. 🤩
#evodevo
Exhausted but extremely happy for the two past days of very exciting Science! The EvoDevOmics Spanish Network gathered together in BCN to discuss about evodevo & omics, lots of great talks, discussions and future collaborations. 🤩
#evodevo
Amazing couple of days enjoying & discussing science in the best possible company during the Barcelona meeting of the 'EvoDevOmics Network', funded by @ageinves.bsky.social. Really happy to see how the EvoDevo community in Spain is thriving & fostering a fantastic new generation of PhDs & Postdocs.
Amazing couple of days enjoying & discussing science in the best possible company during the Barcelona meeting of the 'EvoDevOmics Network', funded by @ageinves.bsky.social. Really happy to see how the EvoDevo community in Spain is thriving & fostering a fantastic new generation of PhDs & Postdocs.
Exhausted but extremely happy for the two past days of very exciting Science! The EvoDevOmics Spanish Network gathered together in BCN to discuss about evodevo & omics, lots of great talks, discussions and future collaborations. 🤩
#evodevo
🚨🧬🚨
We're looking for a specialized Research Assistant to spearhead a project aimed at exploring new RNA therapeutics in diabetes and other metabolic disorders.
Junior or Senior, we're hoping to recruit a highly motivated and self-driven scientist interested in both basic and applied science. 🦄
New preprint!! 🚨 Did you know that many vertebrate species determine sex based on environmental conditions rather than chromosomes? Some turtles, like Trachemys scripta, rely on temperature. We learned more about how this happen molecularly.👇
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
New preprint!! 🚨 Did you know that many vertebrate species determine sex based on environmental conditions rather than chromosomes? Some turtles, like Trachemys scripta, rely on temperature. We learned more about how this happen molecularly.👇
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
🚨 1/ Preprint Alert!
Sex determination outcome is conserved across vertebrates (i.e. generating 2 compatible sexes) ♀️♂️
But are the cell types and gene programs behind them conserved too? 🧬
Spoiler: not really 👀
Find out in our new preprint ⬇️
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
📣 Call for Abstracts!
Working on sex chromosomes? Join us at SMBE 2026 in Copenhagen (28 June–2 July). All taxa, systems, and approaches welcome!
⏰ Deadline: 3 Feb 2026
👉 smbe2026.org/abstracts/
Ayer estuvimos presentando el primer Poster del laboratorio en el X congreso de la sociedad española de Biologia Evolutiva. #SESBE2026@sesbe-org.bsky.social
Congratulations to @paucarazo.bsky.social and the other organizers of the #sesbe2026 meeting of the @sesbe-org.bsky.social . It has been a wonderful conference with nice talks, posters and networking, I the wonderful city of Valencia, my home town.
We're happy to share that our article "Overcoming the widespread flaws in the annotation of vertebrate selenoprotein genes in public databases" has been published:
journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol...#bioinformatics#recoding#selenoproteins#geneannotation Collab with @rodericguigo.bsky.social
🚨 We are hiring!
🧬 PhD Position – Genomic Architecture & Evolution
Join our team at UAB (Barcelona) in an international project
🔬 4-year FPI contract
🎓 Biology/Genetics background + Master’s + English
📅 Apply by Sept 30, 2025
📧 aurora.ruizherrera@uab.cat
🔗 grupsderecerca.uab.cat/evolgenom
Spanish EvoDevo at its best. Congrats to the team on this cool work 🥂🍾
Turns out that “deep conservation of CREs across hundreds of millions of years is far more widespread than previously recognized”
Check it out👇🏻👇🏻👇🏻
Our work on the evolution of the regulatory genome of echinoderms is now out in @natecoevo.nature.com. Led by my former PhD Marta Magri, Danila Voronov & Saoirse Foley. Great collaboration of Arnone, Hinman & Maeso labs, started long time ago with our missed José Luis Gomez-Skarmeta: rdcu.be/eXX8l
#ArticleIRBio
📄Deep conservation of cis-regulatory elements and chromatin organization in echinoderms uncover ancestral regulatory features of animal genomes
👥Magri, Marta S. @imaeso.bsky.social et al.
📕Nature Ecology & Evolution @nature_the_journal
Great news after the Christmas break! The work on the evolution of cis-regulation in echinoderms by the great Marta Magri, a PhD sibling of mine, is out in Nature Ecology and Evolution! www.nature.com/articles/s41...
The Biodiversity Cell Atlas initiative keeps growing! We're looking for a Bioinformatician to join the BCA team in Hinxton (UK).
www.linkedin.com/posts/wellco...
Open Senior Bioinformatician position at
@sangerinstitute.bsky.social
Tree of Life, to work on the Biodiversity Cell Atlas initiative with @marakat.bsky.social and me.
📅 Apply by January 18
🔗 sanger.wd103.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/Wellco...
Please share with anyone who might be interested!
Exciting news to start the new year! We’re thrilled to see this work finally out in @natecoevo.nature.com, the result of a major collaboration between my lab and the labs of Veronica Hinman and Nacho Maeso, began many years ago with the dear José Luis Gómez-Skarmeta.
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
I am extremely proud and happy to announce that another paper from my PhD days has just been published in @natecoevo.nature.com on evolution of genome and gene regulation thanks to all the amazing people involved.
Check the paper out at:
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Our work on the evolution of the regulatory genome of echinoderms is now out in @natecoevo.nature.com. Led by my former PhD Marta Magri, Danila Voronov & Saoirse Foley. Great collaboration of Arnone, Hinman & Maeso labs, started long time ago with our missed José Luis Gomez-Skarmeta: rdcu.be/eXX8l
We also found thousands of deeply conserved cis regulatory elements in echinoderms, some of them shared across different animal phyla and dating back to the Cambrian, suggesting that this type of extreme regulatory conservation is much more common than previously thought
Our work on the evolution of the regulatory genome of echinoderms is now out in @natecoevo.nature.com. Led by my former PhD Marta Magri, Danila Voronov & Saoirse Foley. Great collaboration of Arnone, Hinman & Maeso labs, started long time ago with our missed José Luis Gomez-Skarmeta: rdcu.be/eXX8l
Similar to other animals, sea star and sea urchin genomes are also organized into TAD-like structures. But these TADs do not have the CTCF motif orientation pattern typically found in vertebrates, suggesting that CTCF-mediated loop formation could be a novelty of the vertebrate or chordate lineage