Exciting news to start the new year! We’re thrilled to see this work finally out in @natecoevo.nature.com, the result of a major collaboration between my lab and the labs of Veronica Hinman and Nacho Maeso, began many years ago with the dear José Luis Gómez-Skarmeta. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

In this work, we present Echinoderms as a paradigm to understand how genome organization shapes organismal body plans and their evolution.

We here present two new genome assemblies for S. purpuratus and P. miniata, showing they are organized in TAD-like structures that, unlike vertebrates, are not built with CTCF. We also found deeply conserved cis-regulatory modules such as the one upstream of Tbx2/3, and we functionally evaluated it.

Thanks to everybody involved, especially my former and present lab members: @danivoronov.bsky.social, @perievodevo.bsky.social, @mlrusciano.bsky.social, Claudia Cuomo, Jovana Ranđelović.