Welcome to Sergi Castellano's home page.

I am biologist working in computational and evolutionary biology, with particular interest in the application of these fields to selenium biology and other basic questions in biomedical research.

I earned my Biology degree at the Universitat de Barcelona, spending my last semester in Paul Higgs' lab at the University of Manchester. Back to Spain, I pursued a PhD in Bioinformatics in Roderic Guigó's group at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra and the Centre de Regulació Genòmica in Barcelona. I continued my research in two short stays with Marla J. Berry at the University of Hawaii and Andrew G. Clark at Cornell University in New York. In all these labs, I worked on the computational identification and annotation of selenoproteins and population genetics/molecular approaches to their evolution.

I am currently in Sean R. Eddy's lab at the Janelia Farm Research Campus of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Virginia. I work on probabilistic algorithms for sequence analysis. In mid 2010, I am moving to the Department of Evolutionary Genetics at the Max-Planck-Institut fur evolutionare Anthropologie to lead a group on computational genomics.

Please, drop me a line: castellanos at janelia.hhmi.org

Publications

S Castellano and SR Eddy A probabilistic interpretation of the Smith-Waterman algorithm In preparation A Merlos-Suarez, M Buchholz, A Heidenblut, J Luttges, S Castellano, T Gress, S Hahn and FX Real A global analysis of the human pancreatic transcriptome defines a distinct gene expression profile in ductal cells Submitted JF Abril, S Castellano and R Guigó Comparative gene prediction M.D. Adams (Ed.). Humana Press. In press   [Invited chapter in A Guide to the Analysis of Eukaryotic Genomes book] S Castellano On the unique function of selenocysteine - insights from the evolution of selenoproteins Biochimica et Biophysica Acta, 1790, 1463-1470 (2009)   [Invited review in Selenoprotein expression and function special issue] S Castellano*, AM Andrés*, E Bosch, M Bayes, R Guigó and AG Clark Low exchangeability of selenocysteine, the 21st amino acid, in vertebrate proteins Molecular Biology and Evolution, 26, 2031-2040 (2009) S Castellano, VN Gladyshev, R Guigó and MJ Berry SelenoDB 1.0: a database of selenoprotein genes, proteins and SECIS elements Nucleic Acids Research, 36, D339-D343 (2008)   [Database] S Castellano Little biological and statistical support for hundreds of selenoproteins in mouse pseudo-messenger RNAs PLoS Genetics, eLetters (2006)   [A critical assessment of computational experiments in PLoS Genetics, 2, e3 (2006)] S Castellano, AV Lobanov, C Chapple, S Novoselov, M Albrecht, D Hua, A Lescure, T Lengauer, A Krol, VN Gladyshev and R Guigó Diversity and functional plasticity of eukaryotic selenoproteins: identification and characterization of the SelJ family Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, 102, 16188-16193 (2005)   [Commentary in PNAS] K Taskov, C Chapple, GV Kryukov, S Castellano, AV Lobanov, KV Korotkov, R Guigó and VN Gladyshev Nematode selenoproteome: the use of selenocysteine insertion system to decode one codon in an animal genome? Nucleic Acids Research, 33, 2227-2238 (2005) International Chicken Genome Sequencing Consortium Sequence and comparative analysis of the chicken genome provide unique perspectives on vertebrate evolution Nature, 432, 695-716 (2004)   [Commentary in Nature] International Tetraodon Genome Sequencing Consortium Genome duplication in the teleost fish Tetraodon nigroviridis reveals the early vertebrate proto-karyotype Nature, 431, 946-957 (2004)   [Commentary in Nature]   [F1000 evaluation] S Castellano Towards the characterization of the eukaryotic selenoproteome: a computational approach PhD thesis, July 2004   [Cover PDF file]   [LaTeX template Tar file] S Castellano, SV Novoselov, GV Kryukov, A Lescure, E Blanco, A Krol, VN Gladyshev and R Guigó Reconsidering the evolution of eukaryotic selenoproteins: a novel nonmammalian family with scattered phylogenetic distribution EMBO reports, 5, 71-77 (2004)   [Datasets]   [Commentary in EMBO]   [F1000 evaluation] GV Kryukov, S Castellano, SV Novoselov, AV Lobanov, O Zehtab, R Guigó and VN Gladyshev Characterization of mammalian selenoproteomes Science, 300, 1439-1443 (2003)   [Datasets] S Castellano, N Morozova, M Morey, MJ Berry, F Serras, M Corominas and R Guigó in silico identification of novel selenoproteins in the Drosophila melanogaster genome EMBO reports, 2, 697-702 (2001)   [Datasets]

^*Equal contribution

Last updated: February 2010