Octavio M. Palacios-Gimenez

Currently, I am a group leader in the Department of Organismal Biology (Systematic Biology Program) at Uppsala University, and in the Institute of Ecology and Evolution (Population Ecology Group) at Friedrich-Schiller-Universtität Jena. I obtained my PhD from Universidade Estadual Paulista - UNESP (Brazil) in 2017 on the evolution patterns of different sex chromosome systems in crickets. Then, from 2018 – 2020 I was post-doc and researcher with Alexander Suh at Uppsala University, where I worked on sex chromosomes, annotation and functional significance of repetitive DNA in grasshoppers and birds.

 

My research focuses on the study of genome evolution in the grasshopper Vandiemenella viatica species complex, particularly sex chromosomes and repetitive DNA using comparative genomics, molecular biology and cytogenetics. While most of the viatica species have X0 system, where females have two X chromosomes and males only one, there has been repeated and independent chromosomal fusions between the ancestral X0 races and autosomes resulting in the formation of new Y chromosomes (males neo-XY and females neo-XX). This allows independent comparisons between pairs of races with different combinations of autosome-X chromosome fusions to investigate the timing and patterns of recombination suppression, gene loss, gene expression differentiation, and genome divergence.