Horizontal gene transfer as evolutionary innovation
What foreign genes do once they arrive in an animal genome, including a bacterial methyltransferase that became part of the host's silencing machinery.
Fernando Rodriguez
Research Scientist · Thomas H. Gosnell School of Life Sciences
My work sits at the junction of molecular evolution, comparative genomics and epigenetics, in the field of gene silencing and activation in metazoans.
The question I keep returning to is how eukaryotic cells recognize and repress foreign genetic material: transposable elements, and genes picked up from bacteria by horizontal gene transfer. I am equally interested in what happens when a piece of that foreign machinery is turned into a tool of the host's own genome defense.
- Office
- Orange Hall 1311
Rochester, NY 14623 - frvsbi@rit.edu
Keywords
- Epigenetics
- Gene silencing
- Transposable elements
- Horizontal gene transfer
- DNA methylation
- Histone modification
- Non-coding RNA
- piRNA pathways
- Retroelements
- Comparative genomics
- Molecular evolution
- Bdelloid rotifers
Current lines of work
Reverse-transcriptase-related genes
Penelope-like retroelements, permuted domain architectures, and giant retroelements that sit at chromosome ends.
Mobile elements in sexual and asexual taxa
How transposon landscapes and the silencing pathways that contain them differ in lineages that have gone without sex for a very long time.
Recent publications
-
2026
Metagenome-assembled genomes from biological soil crusts in sandy sediments of Kitty Todd Nature Preserve, OH, USA
Microbiology Resource Announcements e00380-26
-
2024
Bdelloid rotifers deploy horizontally acquired biosynthetic genes against a fungal pathogen
Nature Communications 15:5787
-
2023
Shaping eukaryotic epigenetic systems by horizontal gene transfer Review
BioEssays 45(7):e2200232
-
2023
An overview of best practices for transposable element identification, classification, and annotation in eukaryotic genomes Chapter
In: Branco MR, de Mendoza Soler A (eds), Transposable Elements. Methods in Molecular Biology, vol. 2607. Humana, New York, NY
-
2022
Bacterial N4-methylcytosine as an epigenetic mark in eukaryotic DNA
Nature Communications 13:1072
Contact
Phone
585-475-2811
Office
Orange Hall 1311
Rochester, NY 14623
Department
Thomas H. Gosnell School of Life Sciences
College of Science, RIT