Toni Gabaldón Estevan

Centre de Regulació Genòmica (CRG)

Life & Medical Sciences

I'm a biochemist and molecular biologist by training (Universities of Valencia and Mainz). After several years working on a molecular biology lab, and attracted by the emerging fields of genomics and bioinformatics, in 2001 I moved to the comparative genomics group of Martijn Huynen in the NCMLS, The Netherlands. In 2005, I obtained a PhD in Medical Sciences (Radbout University Nijmegen), and then moved, thanks to an EMBO fellowship, to the bioinformatics department at CIPF (Valencia). In September 2008 I started my own group in the Bioinformatics and Genomics department at CRG. In 2013 I was awarded an ERC starting grant and an ICREA research professorship. I have always used an evolutionary perspective to address different biological questions. I am not only interested in understanding how complex biological systems work, but also how they have come to be as they are.


Research interests

My main research interest is to understand the complex relationships between genome sequences and phenotypes and how these two features evolve within and across species. I generally use large-scale phylogenetics and molecular evolution approaches that allow looking at the evolution of genomes from the perspective of all of their genes, and apply these analyses to a variety of biological questions related to the evolution and function of biological communities, organisms, organelles, pathways, and families of protein-coding and non-coding genes. I have a special interest in understanding processes related to human pathogenesis. Through collaborations with experimental groups, I apply comparative genomics to discover new mechanisms and genes involved in interesting processes, especially those of clinical relevance. Given our exposure to new types and scales of data, my group has had the need to develop novel bioinformatics tools to fill in existing gaps.

Selected publications

– Pryszcz Leszek P & Gabaldon T 2016, ‘Redundans: an assembly pipeline for highly heterozygous genomes’, Nucleic Acids Research, 44, 12, e113.

– Gabaldon T, Naranjo-Ortiz MA & Marcet-Houben M 2016, ‘Evolutionary genomics of yeast pathogens in the Saccharomycotina’, Fems Yeast Research, 16, 6, fow064.

– Vlasova A (….), Gabaldon T, Herrera-Estrella A & Guigo R 2016, ‘Genome and transcriptome analysis of the Mesoamerican common bean and the role of gene duplications in establishing tissue and temporal specialization of genes’, Genome Biology, 17, 32.

– Mariotti M, Lobanov AV, Manta B, Santesmasses D, Bofill A, Guigó R, Gabaldón T & Gladyshev VN 2016, ‘Lokiarchaeota Marks the Transition between the Archaeal and Eukaryotic Selenocysteine Encoding Systems’, Mol. Biol. Evol., 33 (9): 2441-53.

– Pittis AA & Gabaldon T 2016, ‘Late acquisition of mitochondria by a host with chimaeric prokaryotic ancestry’, Nature, 531, 7592, 101 – +.

– Campbell MA, Ganley AR, Gabaldón T & Cox MP 2016, ‘The Case of the Missing Ancient Fungal Polyploids’, Am. Nat. 188 (6): 602-614.

– Abascal F, Corvelo A, Cruz F, (45 other authors), Gabaldón T, Alioto T & Godoy JA 2016, ‘Extreme genomic erosion after recurrent demographic bottlenecks in the highly endangered Iberian lynx’, Genome Biology​, 17 (1): 251.

– Corrochano L (….), Gabaldon T & Grigoriev IV 2016, ‘Expansion of Signal Transduction Pathways in Fungi by Extensive Genome Duplication’, Current Biology, 26, 12, 1577 – 1584.

– Cruz F, Julca I, Gomez-Garrido J, Loska D, Marcet-Houben M, Cano E, Galan B, Frias L, Ribeca P, Derdak S, Gut M, Sanchez-Fernandez M, Luis Garcia J, Gut IG, Vargas P, Alioto T & Gabaldon T 2016, ‘Genome sequence of the olive tree, Olea europaea’, Gigascience, 5, 29.

– Pegueroles C & Gabaldon T 2016, ‘Secondary structure impacts patterns of selection in human lncRNAs’, BMC Biology, 14, 60.