In The Carvunis Lab, we study the molecular mechanisms of change and innovation in evolution. This involves thinking about how genomes change over time, what cellular processes enable these changes, and how novel molecular networks emerge. We consider evolution in the light of systems biology and systems biology in the light of evolution, in order to gain a better understanding of how cells and organisms live and evolve.

The research tools we rely on most are bioinformatics, yeast genetics and genomics. Generally, we strive to foster an interdisciplinary and collaborative research environment where researchers can develop creative approaches to describe, engineer and predict the genetic and network-level determinants of species-specificity and the emergence of new genetic elements.

We are particularly interested in how novel protein-coding genes can evolve de novo from the “dark matter” of the genome (non-genic sequences). Our work has shown that cellular networks involve many more biomolecules than we thought, and questioned how translation is regulated, by revealing the existence of thousands of novel translated sequences in the genome. We created and maintain the Wikipedia page for de novo gene birth.

The Carvunis Lab is part of the TransCODE Consortium. The TransCODE Consortium is a global collaboration of over 60 labs that aims to map novel translation events to genome and transcript sequences, to annotate them in a standardised and stable format, and to distribute these annotations to the community in a manner that is aligned with FAIR principles.