Iñaki Ruiz-Trillo

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). His educational background includes a B.S. and a Ph.D. 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 80 peer-reviewed articles, most of them in high impact journals, such as Cell, Science, eLife, PNAS. He has lead several research projects, including 2 ERC grants. He is an EMBO member and has served on the editorial board of several journals. His current research interests include the origin of multicellular animals, the evolution of complex life forms, and the diversity of eukaryotes.


Research interests

The lab is interested in understanding how multicellular animals emerged from their unicellular ancestors. To this aim, we perform comparative and functional 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 genetic tools in the closest unicellular relatives to Metazoa and trying to address the origin of animal cell differentiation and animal cell types. Finally, we are also interested in unraveling the hidden diversity of eukaryotes using metabarcoding data.  

Selected publications

- Perez-Posada, Alberto; Dudin, Omaya; Ocana-Pallares, Eduard; Ruiz-Trillo, Inaki; Ondracka, Andrej 2020, 'Cell cycle transcriptomics of Capsaspora provides insights into the evolution of cyclin-CDK machinery', Plos Genetics, 16, 3, e1008584.

- Parra-Acero, Helena; Harcet, Matija; Sanchez-Pons, Nuria; Casacuberta, Elena; Brown, Nicholas H.; Dudin, Omaya; Ruiz-Trillo, Inaki 2020, 'Integrin-Mediated Adhesion in the Unicellular Holozoan Capsaspora owczarzaki', Current Biology, 30, 21, 4270 - +.

- Arroyo, Alicia S; Iannes, Romain; Bapteste, Eric; Ruiz-Trillo, Inaki 2020, 'Gene similarity networks unveil a potential novel unicellular group closely related to animals from the Tara Oceans expedition', Genome Biology And Evolution, 12, 9, 1664 - 1678.

- Ocana-Pallares, Eduard; Vergara, Zaida; Desvoyes, Benedicte; Tejada-Jimenez, Manuel; Romero-Jurado, Ainoa; Galvan, Aurora; Fernandez, Emilio; Ruiz-Trillo, Inaki; Gutierrez, Crisanto 2020, 'Origin Recognition Complex (ORC) Evolution Is Influenced by Global Gene Duplication/Loss Patterns in Eukaryotic Genomes', Genome Biology And Evolution, 12, 2, 3878 - 3889.

- Iñak iRuiz-Trillo and AlexdeMendoza 2020, 'Towards understanding the origin of animal development', Development  147, dev192575. 

- Christopher L et al, (2020), 'Genetic tool development in marine protists: emerging model organisms for experimental cell biology', Nature Methods 17, 481-494.

- Lu, Yameng; Ocana-Pallares, Eduard; Lopez-Escardo, David; Dennis, Stuart R; Monaghan, Michael T; Ruiz-Trillo, Inaki; Spaak, Piet; Wolinska, Justyna 2020, 'Revisiting the phylogenetic position of Caullerya mesnili (Ichthyosporea), a common Daphnia parasite, based on 22 protein-coding genes', Molecular Phylogenetics And Evolution, , 106891 - 106891.