Biology in general and Developmental Evolution in particular are living a revolution after the accumulating amount of available genome data. This permits comparative analyses in a growing range of species, not only at the gene coding level as before, but also of cis-regulatory elements for gene regulation, transcriptomics to identify splicing events, and genome architecture to identify synteny and gene clustering. It is therefore possible to study any given aspect not from a single gene point of view, but with a system level approach, which includes the analyses of gene networks and interconnected processes in a range of species. Then, top-down (systems biology) and bottom-up approaches (molecular biology) are integrating, where both approaches meet, the cellular level.

Our group addresses this middle ground by analysing several kinds of genome changes that may have been implicated in the genesis and increase in complexity, particulary but not exclusively, of one of the most complex cellular structures in life, the vertebrate nervous system. We take advantage of the bulk genome data available for key phylogenetic species, as well as the availability of embryos and manipulation techniques in a range of models, e.g., amphioxus, zebrafish, to study, among others i) changes in transcriptional regulation of gene networks, ii) changes in alternative splicing-regulated networks, and iii) gene clustering by tandem gene duplication.