Professor @Universitat Autonoma Barcelona-Understanding how genomes organize, evolve & are transmitted to the offspring. #genomics #evolution #meiosis #3Dgenome #biodiversity
Co-EiC @heredityjournal.bsky.social
👉https://webs.uab.cat/evolgenom/
Aurora Ruiz-Herrera
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Aurora Ruiz-Herrera
📣 Call for Abstracts!
Working on sex chromosomes? Join us at SMBE 2026 in Copenhagen (28 June–2 July). All taxa, systems, and approaches welcome!
⏰ Deadline: 3 Feb 2026
👉 smbe2026.org/abstracts/
💥2025 has been an extraordinary year for the team, full of challenges, but even more rewarding!
None of this would have been possible without the incredible team of women who make everything happen. Young, driven, but above all, genuinely kind people 💜
Here’s to an even more exciting 2026! 🚀
🔬 Uncovering the mechanisms of sex chromosome dosage compensation in skinks! 🦎 🧬
Our latest collaborative study on how a lizard species with an extraordinary ability to change sexual phenotype maintains genomic balance.
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rdcu.be/eVjqW
🎯Excited to share our new collaborative paper in Mol Ecol - Beautifully lead by @marta-fb.bsky.social & @coreykirkland.bsky.social - Exploring the fascinating evolutionary story of the waterbuck, shaped by climate and unique chromosome changes
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...
🚨 New paper in Nature 🚨
Thrilled to be part of this fascinating collaborative study!
👉 SIRT7 regulates dosage compensation and safeguards the female X chromosome
rdcu.be/fnEZQ
A great example of how chromatin regulation continues to reveal unexpected layers of genome control!
💥Extremely proud of this team!
🎉 Congratulations to Laia Marin-Gual from @uab.cat on being awarded the Pere Alberch Prize by the @sesbe-org.bsky.social for the best doctoral thesis in evolutionary biology this year, and to Lucía Álvarez-Gonzalez for being runner‑up.
Outstanding work!
#sesebe2026
💥Huge shoutout to the @amarques.bsky.social team for an outstanding effort!
So excited to have joined forces to decode how karyotype evolution connects with recombination 🧬
🔗 Preprint here: 👇
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
Advances in sequencing and chromosome-scale assembly have brought non-model animals into focus, deepening our understanding of genome and chromosome evolution. Here, we present the waterbuck (Kobus e...
Nature - SIRT7 safeguards X-chromosome integrity and dosage balance with autosomes.
rdcu.be
Aurora Ruiz-Herrera
Aurora Ruiz-Herrera
Aurora Ruiz-Herrera
Chromosomal fissions, fusions and whole-genome duplications propel genome evolution, yet their impact on meiotic recombination is obscured by the centromere constraint, since in monocentric species most large rearrangements are lethal. Holocentric organisms, which distribute kinetochore activity along the entire chromosome, overcome this barrier and therefore offer a unique window onto the interplay between karyotype change and crossover control. We assembled chromosome-scale genomes for 20 holocentric Rhynchospora species (including 56 haplotypes), representing all major clades of the genus, featuring satellite-based holocentromeres, and integrated single-gamete crossover maps, high-resolution meiotic synapsis cytology and Hi-C chromatin architecture. Breakpoint analysis shows that holocentromeric Tyba satellite arrays are recurrent hotspots for both chromosome fusions and fissions, contributing to the genus's extraordinary chromosome number variation from 2n = 4 to 36. Crossover landscapes group into two apparent modes: strongly distal-biased versus irregularly distributed, which is correlated with divergent patterns of synapsis elongation. Moreover, crossover number scales with chromosome count and meiotic axis length. In contrast, crossover density per megabase is inversely related to chromosome length and to chromatin-loop size. We propose that chromosome fissions create karyotypes with smaller chromosomes folded into shorter loops, thereby increasing the axial substrate accessible for double-strand break formation and elevating recombination frequency. Together, our results provide a structural link between large-scale structural chromosome evolution and meiotic recombination through coupled changes in chromosome number, size, loop geometry, and synapsis dynamics. ### Competing Interest Statement The authors have declared no competing interest.
Pregnancy loss is common in humans, and chromosomal abnormalities are the leading cause. Using genetic data from ~140,000 IVF embryos, we show that maternal variation in meiosis genes influences recombination and aneuploidy risk.
First authors: @saracarioscia.bsky.social & @aabiddanda.github.io
STRIVE
STRIVE
Analysis of data from pre-implantation genetic testing sheds light on the genetic basis of meiotic-origin aneuploidy, the leading cause of human pregnancy loss, identifying common genetic variants ass...
📢 Three new #bioRxiv preprints from our team on holocentric chromosomes.
Together, they connect centromere repeat evolution, karyotype dynamics, and meiotic recombination outcomes, revealing how holocentric genomes evolve and function. 🧬👇
As always, extremely high quality in the PhD thesis research awarded with the Pere Alberch prize by the @sesbe-org.bsky.social , excellent talk too by the awardee Laia Marin from @aruizherrera.bsky.social lab. Congratulations! #sesbe2026