News and other lab activities

We participated in European Researcher's Night, at the event held at the National Technical University of Athens. The entire group joined in and it was lots of fun to engage people of all ages and explain what we study and why.

Last week the group attended the Bio3: Biotechnology, Bioinformatics & Bioeconomy Forum, held in Technopolis, Athens, where Emilios, Nikos, Eirini and Dinesh also presented posters.

Our growing group welcomes Katie, who just finished her undergraduate degree in Genetics in Trinity College Dublin. Katie joins the group thanks to a competitive Calmette & Yersin PhD fellowship from Institut Pasteur. She will collaborate with Eduardo Rocha's group in Institut Pasteur to study the evolutionary origins and mechanisms of transfer of bacteriocins.

We are happy to welcome Somya to the group for three months thanks to an EMBO Scientific Exchange Grant. During here stay, Somya willstudy novel genes in Cnidaria and analyze their expression patterns using publicly available single cell RNA-seq data. The goal of this work is to understand whether novel genes, including any that have evolved de novo, may be associated with the evolution of new cell cnidarian cell types.

Why do yeast de novo genes have so many transmembrane domains? It's because the genomic regions from which they evolved are super enriched in stretches of A's and T's ! The lab's newest work in collaboration with Timothy Fuqua (Andreas Wagner's lab, University of Zurich) is now published in the Journal of Evolutionary Biology (European Society of Evolutionary Biology). The work is available as an accepted manuscript here .