Life & Medical Sciences
Manuel Irimia obtained his PhD in 2010 at University of Barcelona investigating the origin of vertebrates at a genomic level. After two postdocs at Stanford University and University of Toronto, he joined the Centre for Genomic Regulation (CRG) in June 2014. He has been elected EMBO Young Investigator (2018) and obtained an ERC Starting Grant in 2014.
Manuel Irimia’s research is centered on two major questions: How does a single genome sequence encode the information to build the enormous complexity of cell types and structures of an adult organism? How are changes in this sequence translated into morphological novelties during evolution? To address these questions, his lab combines computational and experimental approaches using in vitro and in vivo systems (zebrafish, mouse and fruitfly) to investigate the roles of transcriptomic diversification and specialization in embryonic development and evolution.
– Torres-Méndez A, Bonnal S, Marquez Y, Roth J, Iglesias M, Permanyer J, Almudí I, O’Hanlon D, Guitart T, Soller M, Gingras AC, Gebauer F, Rentzsch F, Blencowe BJB, Valcárcel J & Irimia M 2019, ‘A novel protein domain in an ancestral splicing factor drove the evolution of neural microexons’, Nature Ecol Evol, 3, 4, 691 – 701.
– Skvortsova K, Tarbashevich K, Stehling M, Lister R, Irimia M, Raze E & Bogdanovic O 2019, ‘Retention of paternal DNA methylome in the developing zebrafish germline’, Nature Communications, 10, 3054.
– Ustaoglu P, Haussmann IU, Liao H, Torres-Mendez A, Arnold R, Irimia M & Soller M 2019, ‘Srrm234, but not canonical SR and hnRNP proteins, drive inclusion of Dscam exon 9 variable exons’, Rna, 25, 10, 1353 – 1365.
– Irimia M & Maeso M 2019, Boosting Macroevolution: Genomic Changes Triggering Qualitative Expansions of Regulatory Potential, in Old Questions and Young Approaches to Animal Evolution, pp 175-207, Springer Nature Switzerland AG.
– 10 invited scientific seminars.
– 7 oral communications in international scientific meetings (6 as invited speaker).
– 1 supervised PhD thesis defended, and 4 as evaluation panel member.