People

Octavio M. Palacios-Gimenez

I began my independent research at Uppsala University in January 2021, funded by a VR Starting Grant (Swedish Research Council Vetenskapsrådet) early-career researcher grant. I obtained my PhD from Universidade Estadual Paulista - UNESP (Brazil) in 2017 on the evolution patterns of different sex chromosome systems in crickets. Then, from 2018 – 2020 I was post-doc and researcher with Alexander Suh at Uppsala University, where I worked on sex chromosomes, annotation and functional significance of repetitive DNA in grasshoppers and birds. My research interests involve understanding the molecular mechanisms and evolutionary consequences of nascent sex chromosomes from a comparative genomics perspective. I aim to uncover how neo-sex chromosome in grasshoppers evolve, with a particular interesting in patterns of recombination cessation, gene loss, gene expression differentiation, and genome divergence.