Our main interests deal with protein evolution (#ProtEvol) and its relationship with structure/function (#StruFunct) in the context of signaling pathways (#SigPath).

To illustrate these concepts, we have for instance identified novel roles and residues involved in functional specificity for the RAS superfamily of proteins (Rojas et al, 2012,  J. cell Biol. [PMID:22270915]), described the making-up of the human DNA Damage Response pathway (Arcas et al, Mol. Biol. Evol., 2014, [PMID: 24441036], and discovered a novel Mistmatch Repair pathway in prokaryotes (Figure down, left panel- Castañeda et al, 2017, Nat. Comm [DOI:10.1038/ncomms14246]).

In the same line we have collaborated extensively with experimental groups to describe the mitochondrial role of EXD2 (Silva et al,  2018, Nat. Cell Biol. [PMID: 29335528]) or analysed in detail the role of particular residues mutated in patient samples (Trsitan-Calvijo et al, 2016, Mov. Disords [PMID 27477325]).

 

We are also interested on the large-scale integration (#Integration) of transcriptomics, genomics and epigenomics data to address hypothesis-driven biological problems, as well as biomedical questions of interest. To this purpose we have designed Bioinformatics tools (Andres-Leon, 2016, Sci. Rep. [PMID:27167008]) that have been applied to identify mRNA-miRNA signatures in tumors relevant to survival. The underlying concept is to use  the "pair of molecules" (mRNA-miRNA) instead  the single molecule (mRNA or miRNA) to indetify  tumor-type specific pairs relevant to response to survival (Figure up, right panel,  [Andres-Leon et al, 2017, Sci. Rep. [PMID: 28387377]).

If you are interested in joining Rojas’ lab (http://www.idoproteins.com), please contact Ana at a.rojas.m@csic.es or at arojmen@upo.es