Ferdinand Marlétaz's lab
Comparative regulatory genomics, phylogenomics and bodyplan evolution

People

Ferdinand Marlétaz

Ferdinand is supported by Royal Society University Research Fellowship. His main research question focuses on the relationship between the diversity of genome organisations, the regulation of developmental gene expression and the evolution of animal body plans. He received his BSc and MSc at the Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon and his Phd from the University of Marseille. His Phd work was focused on the enigmatic phylum of chaetoganths. He was a postdoctoral researcher with Pr. Peter Holland in Oxford where he started his work on whole genome duplications in vertebrates and he later moved to Japan in the unit of Pr. Daniel Rokhsar at the Okinawa Institute of Science & Technology. In 2020, he joined the GEE department at UCL to start his research group.


Elise Parey

Elise started as a postdoc in the lab in 2022, primarily focused on the evolution of echinoderm regulatory architecture. Newton International Fellowship. Previously, she conducted her PhD research at the ENS in Paris working with Hugues Roest-Crollius and Camille Berthelot on the evolution of fish genomes and the impact of whole genome duplications on chromosomal organisation.


Laura Piovani

Laura is a postdoctoral researcher working on single-cell and spatial transcriptomics approaches to understand the echinoderm bodyplan. She graduated from the University of Milano and received her PhD from UCL in 2021. She is fascinated by the diversity and evolution of marine larva and how to use single-cell sequencing to understand the relationships of larval cell-types and the origin of animal life cycles. Laura is also an avid climber, skier, diver and a proud member of the North London Moutainering Club. Twitter URL


Omar Matar

Omar joined the lab as a PhD student in 2022 to work on the regulatory analysis of metamorphosis in sea urchins. Before that, he completed an undergraduate degree in Molecular Biotechnology at the University of Heidelberg gaining insight into cancer biology, neurodegeneration and developmental biology during his research. During his time in Heidelberg he joined Aissam Ikmi’s research group at EMBL focusing on tentacle tip regeneration in Nematostella. In 2021 he completed his Master of Science in Pharmaceutical Formulation and Entrepreneurship at UCL working on Nerve Wrap formulation for nerve crush injury, local immunosuppression for the transplantation of engineered neural tissue to bridge nerve transections.


Lucas King

Lucas joined the lab as a PhD student in 2024 to work on spatial transcriptomics and comparative genomics of sea urchins. He graduated from Banghor university with a degree in Marine Biology. He worked as a research assistant at the National History Museum where he became an expert in echinodederm taxonomy and took part in oceanic cruise to study deep sea fauna of the Pacific ocean.




Marie Emilie Maeland

Marie Emilie is a research assistant in the lab since Septembre 2023 after she graduated with a MSci at UCL. Marie is involved in optimising the culture protocols for sea urchin larvae and juveniles, as well as molecular biology and imaging work.



Alumni

  • Nils Kerneis was a MRes student (2021) who studied Hox gene of the tuxedo sea urchin.
  • Noorain Khan was a MSc project student (2021) in the lab who worked on establishing reporter constructs in the sea urchin.
  • Srishti Arya was a MRes student (2020) working on the regulation of bristle star regeneration co-supervised with Paola Oliveri.
  • Julien Pichon joined the lab for his M1 interships (2020) during his Master of Bioinformatics from the University of Paris. He worked on the improvement of genome annotation for processing single-cell transcriptomics data. He is also passionate about peoleogenetics, explorer of tropical jungles in the china sea archipelagos and admirer of the Iriomote cat.

Collaborations