Iñaki Ruiz-Trillo

Institut de Biologia Evolutiva

Life & Medical Sciences

Iñaki Ruiz-Trillo is an ICREA Research Professor at the Institut de Biologia Evolutiva (CSIC-UPF) in Barcelona. His educational background includes a B.S. and a PhD in Biology from the University of Barcelona. Funded by grants from EMBO and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, he completed a post-doctoral fellowship at Dalhousie University (Canada). He has also performed short term research projects at the Joint Genome Institute, the University of Arkansas and the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics. Iñaki has published more than 60 peer-reviewed articles, most of them in high impact journals, such as Cell, Science, eLife, and PNAS. He has lead several research projects, including 2 ERC grants. He is an EMBO member and serves in the editorial board of several journals. His current research interests include the origin of multicellular animals and the evolution of complex life forms.


Research interests

The lab is interested in understanding how multicellular animals emerged from their unicellular ancestors. To this aim, we perform comparative genomic analyses between multicellular animals and their closest unicellular relatives to unravel the nature of the unicellular ancestor that gave rise to animals. We are also currently developing molecular techniques and transgenesis tools in the closest unicellular relatives to Metazoa. Finally, we are also interested in unraveling the hidden diversity among opisthokonts lineages using metabarcoding data.

Selected publications

– Lopez-Escardo D, Paps J, de Vargas C, Massana R, Ruiz-Trillo I & del Campo J 2018, ‘Metabarcoding analysis on European coastal samples reveals new molecular metazoan diversity’, Scientific Reports, 8, 9106.

– Rafels-Ybern A, Gabriel Torres A, Grau-Bove X, Ruiz-Trillo I & Ribas de Pouplana L 2018, ‘Codon adaptation to tRNAs with Inosine modification at position 34 is ...’, RNA Biology.15, 4-5, 500 – 507.

– Parra-Acero H, Ros-Rocher N, Perez-Posada A, Kozyczkowska A, Sanchez-Pons N, Nakata A, Suga H, Najle SR & Ruiz-Trillo I 2018, ‘Transfection of Capsaspora owczarzaki, a close unicellular relative of animals’, Development, 145, 10, UNSP dev162107.

– Ondracka A, Dudin O & Ruiz-Trillo I 2018, ‘Decoupling of Nuclear Division Cycles and Cell Size during the Coenocytic Growth of the Ichthyosporean Sphaeroforma arctica’, Current Biology, 28, 12, 1964.

– Grau-Bove X, Ruiz-Trillo I & Irimia M 2018, ‘Origin of exon skipping-rich transcriptomes in animals driven by evolution of gene architecture’, Genome Biology, 19, 135.

– Brate J, Neumann RS, Fromm B, Haraldsen AAB, Tarver JE, Suga H, Donoghue PCJ, Peterson KJ, Ruiz-Trillo I, Grini PE & Shalchian-Tabrizi K 2018, ‘Unicellular Origin of the Animal MicroRNA Machinery’, Current Biology, 28, 20, 3288.

– Arroyo AS, Lopez-Escardo D, Kim E, Ruiz-Trillo I & Najle SR 2018, ‘Novel Diversity of Deeply Branching Holomycota and Unicellular Holozoans Revealed by Metabarcoding in Middle Parana River, Argentina’, Frontiers In Ecology And Evolution, 6, 99.

– López-Escardó D, López-García P, Moreira D, Ruiz-Trillo I & Torruella G 2018, ‘Parvularia atlantis gen. et sp. nov., a Nucleariid Filose Amoeba (Holomycota, Opisthokonta), The Journal of Eukaryotic Microbiology 65(2):170-179