MOBILE GENOMES
'We investigate the patterns and mechanisms of genomic variation in disease'
ORCID: 0000-0002-0997-8799
Web of Science ResearcherID H-2213-2015
The main focus of my research interests along my scientific career has been the implication of chromosomal variation in the evolution of species and its role in disease and cancer.
University of Vigo, Spain (2012 - 2017): My PhD thesis focused on the study of repetitive DNA and karyological evolution in the genomes of Venerid clams by means of cytogenetic and molecular biology approaches. M y research greatly expanded the previous knowledge about cytogenetics, molecular taxonomy and epigenetics in marine invertebrates, having a broad record of publications in this subject with various collaborators (i.e., Scientific Reports 2017). During this time, I performed two stays abroad funded by FPU research stay fellowships. One supervised by M Plohl (Ruđer Bošković Institute, Croatia, 2015), which led us to an in-depth description of a satellite DNA s in molluscs that resulted in a fruitful international collaboration that continues to this day (Scientific Reports 2017, 2019, Genes 2020, IJMS 2021) and a project funded by the Croatian Ministry of Science (HRZZ IP 2019 04 5522 EvoSat), and a second one, at JM Eirín López’s lab (Florida International University, USA, 2016), focused on epigenetics on marine invertebrates (Aquatic Toxicology 2017, Frontiers in Marine Science 2020, Molecular Ecology 2022) and on the detection of invasive species (Journal for Nature Conservation 2017), initiating an international collaboration that lasts until present.
CINBIO, University of Vigo, Spain (2017): I started my postdoctoral training in 2017 at JMC Tubío’s Genomes and Disease lab (https://genomesdisease.tech/), an internationally recognized expert in retrotransposons and cancer, first at CINBIO (UVIGO, Spain) and then at CIMUS (USC, Spain). There, I set on a path to develop long read wet lab sequencing protocols and obtained extensive experience in bioinformatics on genomes assembly and to detect, phase and reconstruct retrotransposon and viral insertions from short and long read NGS data within the framework of the international Pancancer consortium and his ERC Starting Grant project about transmissible tumours (ScubaCancers, 716290, Nature Cancer, 2023).
Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, UK (2018 2021): I n 2018 I obtained a Postdoctoral contract from the Xunta de Galicia which included a two and a half year stay at Welcome Sanger Institute (UK, 2018 2020) supervised by P. Campbell, in which I c ontributed to the understanding of the biology of clonally transmissible cancers in bivalves (eLife 2022, Nature Cancer 2023) and collaborated in the international Pancancer consortium (Nature Genetics 2020, Nature Communications 2021).
Genomes and Disease, CIMUS, University of Santiago de Compostela, Spain (2021 - Present): For the last two years I’ve built my path towards scientific independence thanks to an autonomous Government grant to study the impact of somatic retrotransposition in the genomic architecture. During this time, I’ve built a good scientific network by joining the European Reference Genome Atlas (ERGA) initiative and two Spanish SARS COV 2 genomic monitoring groups, SeqCovid and EPICOVIGAL (Nature 2021, Nat Gen 2021) and through various collaborations on previous and new topics European Journal of Soil Biology 2022; Glia, 2022). I currently supervise two PhD candidates on, respectively, the development of bioinformatic pipelines for the study of DNA methylation from nanopore long reads (Javier Temes Rodríguez) and about transmissible neoplasias in bivalves (Alejandro Viñas Feás). I just recently published about ecDNAs linked to viral infections in cancer (Frontiers in Virology, 2023).
