About me

I am a Post Doctoral Research Associate at the Centre de Regulació Genòmica in Barcelona, working in the Comparative Regulatory Genomics lab. We use comparative genomics and transcriptomics to investigate the evolutionary dynamics of genome regulation and cell type diversity across the eukaryotic tree of life — from animals to protists.

Our latest work includes a transcriptomic reconstruction of the early evolutionary origin of animal neurons using single-cell atlases of four placozoans and a phylogenetic investigation of chromatin evolution in eukaryotes combining comparative genomics and proteomics.

I have also released Possvm, a handy piece of software that can identify and annotate clusters of orthologous genes directly from phylogenetic trees.

In the past, I worked with David Weetman at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine, studying the evolution of insecticide resistance adaptations in Anopheles mosquitoes responsible for malaria transmission as part of the Anopheles gambiae 1000 Genomes project within MalariaGEN.

I obtained my PhD from the University of Barcelona in 2017, under the supervision of Iñaki Ruiz-Trillo, investigating the origin of multicellularity in animals using comparative genomic analyses of animals and their unicellular relatives. You can learn more about this in my favourite publications from my thesis:

• Dynamics of genomic innovation in the unicellular ancestry of animals (Grau-Bové et al. eLife 2017)

• Origin of exon skipping-rich transcriptomes in animals driven by evolution of gene architecture (Grau-Bové et al. Genome Biology 2018), which I talked about in this post.

Recent posts

From my blog:

New paper on cell type evolution in placozoans and the early origin of the neuron expression programme

October 12th, 2023, by xgrau

We have recently published a new paper on cell type evolution in four placozoan species using single-cell transcriptomics. We explore their cell type diversity and study their evolution within the Placozoa phylum and beyond.

New paper on chromatin evolution in eukaryotes

June 10th, 2022, by xgrau

We have recently published a new paper on the evolution of chromatin in eukaryotes:

Recoded protein mixture models for IQ-TREE

May 4th, 2022, by xgrau

I have set up a Github repository with NEXUS files of mixture models for some common amino-acid recoding schemes (Dayhoff6, Dayhoff9, SR4, SR6, KGB6). They can be used in IQ-TREE with the -mdef flag, which allows you to use non-default models.

Predicting the effects of alternative splicing events with VEP

January 10th, 2020, by xgrau

This post is a stub. How can we predict the effects of alternative splicing (AS) events with the Ensembl Variant Effect Predictor (VEP)? In our recent paper in eLife, we did so by encoding them as if they were indels.

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