Hello! I am Emilio Mármol Sánchez, veterinarian and researcher specialized in bioinformatics, biostatistics, genomics, and transcriptomics, with a particular interest in RNA biology and gene regulatory networks. My current work focuses on developing and optimizing laboratory and computational approaches to study RNA molecules in archival and ancient biological sources, while also applying multi-omics approaches to investigate how population dynamics and genetic load shape the epigenetic landscape and genomic architecture of extinct and extant endangered species.
These interests are reflected in my research background, which has consistently focused on mammalian biology from diverse yet complementary perspectives. During my Master’s in Bioinformatics and Biostatistics, I developed a pipeline, eMIRNA, to predict novel microRNA genes from small RNA-seq data (1), combining machine learning and RNA structural inference. This project sparked my long-term interest in RNA biology and laid the foundation for my PhD research, when I investigated gene regulatory changes in response to feed intake in muscle and adipose tissue using RNA-seq and small RNA-seq data the pig as a model (2), as well as the effect of potentially deleterious mutations altering gene expression phenotypes using eGWAS (3,4,5,6). I have also examined microRNA variation and genetic load across domestic goat and pig breeds worldwide (7,8), and I have developed a bioinformatics pipeline, EISAcompR, to disentangle post-transcriptional regulation from other sources of gene expression variation (9). These projects reflect both my ability to address biological questions and to create new analytical tools for the community. As a Postdoctoral researcher, I expanded my research interest into the study of ancient and archival RNA molecules (10). In this way, I have developed innovative laboratory and computational techniques enabling the characterization of the first gene expression profiles obtained from the extinct Tasmanian tiger (11).
At the University of Copenhagen, I am now extending this framework to other extinct and extant species, including domestic and wild endangered organisms, by using a multi-omics approach including transcriptomics, structural genomics and epigenetics. In parallel, I lead a project analyzing DNA and RNA profiles using FFPE human tissues from a pathological collection of brain diseases.
I am open to new research job opportunities. If you find my research profile of interest and want to propose a collaboration or project, please contact me at [email protected]