Alberto Vicens, PhD

My principal interest as researcher is to understand the contribution of different evolutionary forces – mutation, selection, recombination, demography and drift - to genome evolution. I primarily focus my research on mammals. They show a wide variation of life history traits, lineages with well known diversity of mating systems, and there is a growing ability of genomic information for this taxonomic group.

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My research on molecular evolution has several goals. For example, I work to shed light on the signals of positive selection in the protein-coding genes and then I explore the evolutionary forces driving such adaptive changes. For this purpose, I correlate estimates of molecular evolutionary rate, such as dN/dS, with measures of life history (e g. longevity) or behavioural traits (eg. sexual selection). I would also like to determine the selective pressures that drive the rapid evolution of some groups of genes such as sex-biased genes and reproductive genes, both at coding sequence and expression levels.

Charles Darwin's theory of sexual selection posits that sex-specific phenotypes that increase reproductive success can spread throughout a species, even if they are detrimental to an individual's survival. In most species, the males are subjected to strong sexual selection, either through direct competition with other males or through female mating preferences. A form of inter-male post-copulatory sexual selection is sperm competition, that involves the competence between the ejaculate from different males to fertilize the ova. Sperm competition has shaped the evolution of multiple adaptive ejaculate traits to increase the fertilization success.

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A common observation is the rapid divergence of proteins involved in sexual reproduction, and it has been largely documented that sexual selection is a major force promoting the adaptive evolution of reproductive genes. During my PhD, my research was focused on identifying the molecular targets of sperm competition in the spermatozoa. By performing comparative genomic and proteomic approaches, I identified a set of sperm proteins evolving in response to sperm competition, undergoing adaptive changes in protein-coding  sequence or expression.

Ion signalling is one of the most extensively employed signal transduction mechanisms in life. Notably, unique sperm ion transporters are essential for sperm activity within the female reproductive and male fertility, providing unique targets to develop male-driven contraceptive treatments. While all sperm share their goal to find and fertilize an egg, the molecular mechanisms they utilize for this purpose are very diverse among species, especially on the level of ion channels. Thus, to known the repertoire and the functional differences of sperm ion transporters among species is essential to understand the adaption of sperm to the specific fertilization environment.

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My evolutionary studies have focused on the well-characterized sperm-specific potassium channel Slo3. I explored the origin of this channel that regulates the onset of sperm capacitation, unravelling a pre-mammalian origin of Slo3 channel. I also analyzed the molecular evolution of genes encoding Slo1 and Slo3 paralogous channels, discovering that the structural divergence of Slo3 channel is  driven by both positive selection and relaxation of selective constraints.

The tumorgenesis is an evolutionary process where cancer cells change by mutations that drive proliferation of tumors, cancer invasion of other tissues (methastasis) and resistance to therapies. Therefore, tumorgenesis needs to be approached as an evolutionary process.

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In the Phylogenomics Lab, we are focused on identifying the selective processes that govern tumor growth by applying population genetics and evolutionary approaches on cancer genomic data. Our findings will contribute to better understand the process of tumor evolution and help to develop more effective prevention and therapies against cancer.

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In addition, I also work on employing multispecies genome comparisons aimed to identify genetic variants associated with cancer resistance and predisposition in organisms. The findings of this research would provide new molecular targets to develop genetic terapies.