He began his research career investigating the evolution of several gene families in Drosophila spp., before switching to analysing similar gene families in chordates. He has also investigated the impact of transposable elements and the evolution of epigenetics mechanisms in chordate genomes. His recent work has focused on the effect of gene losses on the evolution of developmental gene networks in chordates by comparative studies between vertebrates and the urochordate Oikopleura dioica. This emergent model animal has suffered an extreme genome compaction accompanied of massive gene loss events. Ricard Albalat's homepage