2025 news

Jordana I.N. Oliveira obtained a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions fellowship to join our laboratory as a postdoc in 2025, to understand the evolutionary patterns of small RNAs and their potential link with viral endogenization across unicellular eukaryotes.

After our story about the unicellular-Sox made mouse, we have become "experts" in quirky mice phenotypes, so with Ben Tapon we got the chance to write a piece on the Woolly Mice generated by Colossal for The Conversation.

Thanks to a Royal Society Kan Tong Po Fellowship, I visited our collaborator's lab at Hong Kong University, where we talked about our follow up stories regarding the evolutionary history of Sox and POU transcription factors.

A local newspaper covering the Sox paper. Newspapers in Hong Kong are usually used to wrap fish in the wet markets, so with luck that might have been the fate for this page.

The humble origins of Sox/POU

In this fantastic collaboration with the group of Ralf Jauch in Hong Kong University, we found out that Sox and POU genes, famous for their roles in stem cells, are older than previously thought. Not only that, but choanoflagellate Sox genes can substitute Sox2 when making mice induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSC). These, in turn, can contribute to make a chimeric mice, which we dubbed the "choano-mice". Then, we also reconstructed ancestral sequences in collaboration with the Hochberg group at the Max Plank, to find reveal that many of the ancestral Sox proteins have Sox2-like potential. Choanoflagellate POU is also remarkable, as very few species encode them, yet its DNA binding specificity is still very much like most homeodomains, not yet binding to the octamer, the preferred motif for animal POU orthologues. See the paper here:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-54152-x

This research has sparked quite an unexpected love from the media outlets, and we got covered in several venues, including the Washington Post and Forbes:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2024/11/28/lab-grown-mouse-stem-cells/

https://www.forbes.com/sites/scotttravers/2024/12/11/scientists-can-now-recreate-a-mouse-without-its-dna-heres-how-it-works/

All the way to a funnily titled version in a British tabloid:

https://www.dailystar.co.uk/news/billion-year-old-mouse-created-34152890

The first works of the lab are out in BioRxiv

After starting the laboratory during the pandemic in 2020, finally the projects that we've been working on start to see the light. Projects take time to mature, but here we have two exciting works on DNA methylation (what else!) that break new grounds.

In this study, Luke follows the rabbit hole of Amoebidium's genome, the major chunk of his PhD. What started as an evolutionary investigation into the origins of animal 5mC, ended up being a crazy story about giant viruses and other genomic oddities, lateral gene transfer in eukaryotes and epigenomic arm races. Have a look in BioRxiv here: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.01.08.574619v1.

A summarised "tweetorial" can be read here: https://x.com/deMendoza_Alex/status/1744633351036649884?s=20

Then, we are lucky to share department with the great Martin-Duran lab, so we joined forces to study annelid methylomes, a so far neglected phylum in 5mC research. Led by Kero Guynes, we found that methylation is all but stable across development in annelids, and that methylation erosion extends to ageing in these critters. Find the link to the preprint here: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.12.21.572802v1.full.

Chema wrote a nice tweetorial here: https://x.com/Chema_MD/status/1739740306344448329?s=20

Long life to non-model organisms!