Sergio Castillo-Lara

University of Barcelona | UB · Department of Genetics, Microbiology and Statistics

For successful regeneration, the identity of the missing tissue must be specified according to the pre-existing tissue. Planarians are ideal for the study of the mechanisms underlying this process; the same field of cells can regrow a head or a tail according to the missing body part. After amputation, the differential activation of the Wnt/β-caten...

Embryonic specification of the first body axis requires the formation of an Organizer, a group of cells with the ability to instruct fates in the surrounding tissue. The existence of organizing regions in adults, i.e. during regeneration, which also requires patterning of new tissues, remains unstudied. To that aim, we study regeneration in planari...

There is an increasing amount of transcriptomic and genomic data available for planarians with the advent of both traditional and single–cell RNA sequencing technologies. Therefore, exploring, visualizing, and making sense of all these data in order to understand planarian regeneration and development can be challenging. In this work we present Pl...

RPGeNet offers researchers a user-friendly queriable tool to visualize the interactome network of visual disorder genes, thus enabling the identification of new potential causative genes and the assignment of novel candidates to specific retinal or cellular pathways. This can be highly relevant for clinical applications as retinal dystrophies affec...

Motivation: Protein-protein interactions (PPIs) are very important to build models for understanding many biological processes. Although several databases hold many of these interactions, exploring them, selecting those relevant for a given subject, and contextualizing them can be a difficult task for researchers. Extracting PPIs directly from the...

Motivation: Planarians are emerging as a model organism to study regeneration in animals. However, the little available data of protein-protein interactions hinders the advances in understanding the mechanisms underlying its regenerating capabilities. Results: We have developed a protocol to predict protein-protein interactions using sequence ho...

Retinitis pigmentosa (RP) is a highly heterogeneous genetic visual disorder with more than 70 known causative genes, some of them shared with other non-syndromic retinal dystrophies (e.g. Leber congenital amaurosis, LCA). The identification of RP genes has increased steadily during the last decade, and the 30% of the cases that still remain unassig...