Moisés Expósito-Alonso
Assistant Professor
University of California, Berkeley
Moisés Expósito-Alonso is an Assistant Professor of Global Change Biology in the Department of Integrative Biology at the University of California, Berkeley, a Freeman Hrabowski Scholar at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and a member of the Innovative Genomics Institute.
Expósito-Alonso investigates the genetic processes that drive species adaptation or extinction in response to new environmental conditions brought about by climate change.
Focusing on model plant species, he and his team combines long term evolutionary experiments at field sites around the world with molecular biology and genomics to explore the gene pathways involved in plant climate adaptation, as well as the speed and predictability of rapid evolution. By integrating biodiversity modelling with genomic data, Expósito-Alonso’s research is revealing how climate and land use changes shape species evolution and contribute to the global loss of genetic diversity.
Within AEGIS, Expósito-Alonso leads research on temporal genomic analyses of short-term evolution experiments as well as natural evolution experiments of wild populations using historical DNA. Using from Arabidopsis to hundreds of other plant species with newly sequenced genomes, they investigate which genes have been repeatedly targeted by natural selection across episodes of climate change in Earth's history. A central goal is to bridge within-species genomic diversity with broader patterns of between-species plant evolution.
His group is also pioneering an ancient DNA resurrection approach — identifying alleles from photoreceptor and flowering-time pathway genes preserved in two-million-year-old environmental DNA, then introducing these ancient variants into Arabidopsis as a heterologous system to characterize their phenotypic effects and infer how plants tracked past climatic shifts.
Expósito-Alonso investigates the genetic processes that drive species adaptation or extinction in response to new environmental conditions brought about by climate change.
Focusing on model plant species, he and his team combines long term evolutionary experiments at field sites around the world with molecular biology and genomics to explore the gene pathways involved in plant climate adaptation, as well as the speed and predictability of rapid evolution. By integrating biodiversity modelling with genomic data, Expósito-Alonso’s research is revealing how climate and land use changes shape species evolution and contribute to the global loss of genetic diversity.
Within AEGIS, Expósito-Alonso leads research on temporal genomic analyses of short-term evolution experiments as well as natural evolution experiments of wild populations using historical DNA. Using from Arabidopsis to hundreds of other plant species with newly sequenced genomes, they investigate which genes have been repeatedly targeted by natural selection across episodes of climate change in Earth's history. A central goal is to bridge within-species genomic diversity with broader patterns of between-species plant evolution.
His group is also pioneering an ancient DNA resurrection approach — identifying alleles from photoreceptor and flowering-time pathway genes preserved in two-million-year-old environmental DNA, then introducing these ancient variants into Arabidopsis as a heterologous system to characterize their phenotypic effects and infer how plants tracked past climatic shifts.