From left to right: Irene Otero-Muras, Alfonso Jaramillo, Ana Conesa and Christina Toft.

Four new members have joined the scientific faculty of the Institute of Integrative Systems Biology I2SysBio (mixed University of Valencia-CSIC center). These are Ana Conesa, Alfonso Jaramillo, Irene Otero-Muras and Christina Toft who are established as new research group leaders at the institute.

Ana Conesa is interested in understanding the functional aspects of gene expression on a genome-wide scale, in different organisms, to explain development, adaptation and pathological processes. The Conesa laboratory has developed more than 20 different algorithms and software tools that use high-throughput molecular data to analyze the dynamic aspects of transcriptomes, integrate them with other types of molecular data, and functionally annotate them. She is an expert in integrated multi-layer systems biology modeling of multi-omics data and analyzing third-generation sequencing technologies and single-cell methods to reveal the complexity of transcriptional regulation. Previously a professor at the University of Florida, as a Research Professor at the CSIC she now directs the Genomics of Gene Expression laboratory.

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Alfonso Jaramillo is interested in engineering new types of living organisms from scratch for applications in medicine and artificial intelligence. To this end, it has developed new computational-experimental methodologies for the de novo design of proteins, RNA, viruses and cells. His group focuses on two main applications: the de novo engineering of organism-specific antibiotics and the de novo engineering of living artificial intelligence. For the first application, they use the directed evolution of virus-like particles and thus exploit the same weapons as bacteria in the war of antibiotic resistance. For the second application, they have genetically engineered a bacteria to encode a genetic artificial neural network capable of learning on its own through reinforcement learning. Alfonso Jaramillo has been a research professor at the CNRS (France) and a professor at the University of Warwick (United Kingdom). He is currently a Scientific Researcher at the CSIC and directs the De Novo Synthetic Biology group.

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Irene Otero-Muras's research has always been driven by the interest in understanding the mechanisms and behavior of complex biomolecular networks. His group's mission is the design, analysis, optimization and control of biomolecular networks to advance fundamental understanding and address innovative applications for synthetic and systems biology. An example would be the design of synthetic gene circuits capable of providing cells with novel functionalities with environmental or biomedical applications, as well as the optimization and control of metabolic processes in cellular factories. Previously a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Biosystems Science and Engineering at ETH-Zürich and in the Bioprocess Engineering Group (IIM, CSIC), Irene Otero-Muras will lead the new Computational Synthetic Biology group as a Senior Scientist at the CSIC.

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Christina In 2018, Toft received a Scientific Excellence project from Junior Investigators (SEJI) from the Generalitat Valenciana, to create his own research group Panomics and Microbiology of Evolutionary Systems, at the institute. It uses theoretical and experimental evolution to understand the emergence of novel functions, focusing on mechanisms that have been linked to large evolutionary leaps and the emergence of biological complexity. Emphasis is being placed on determining the implications of mechanisms on evolvability and adaptability over a short and long evolutionary time, by performing comparative genomics to infer the evolutionary paths and evolution of microorganisms under different laboratory conditions to observe evolution in real time. The investigated evolutionary trajectories are studied at the genomic and regulatory level. She has now secured her position at I2SysBio after becoming a Senior Scientist at the CSIC.

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