Francisco Úbeda de Torres

Research Interests

Born and raised in Madrid (Spain) I abandoned the urban jungle following the shine of a star that turned to be Knoxville’s Sunsphere. I joined UT’s EEB Department in 2007 where I am one of its three members (arrived from far away countries) working on Theoretical Evolutionary Biology.

My work is focused on intragenomic conflict. I envision organisms as societies of individual genes seeking their own benefit. Such genes can either cooperate when they are under the same selective pressure or hinder each other when they are under opposing selective forces. My interest lies on conflict between genes within these “societies” and on the evolution of genetic mechanisms able to mitigate or resolve these conflicts.

Over the last few years, I have been investigating conflict on genetic transmission and expression, particularly (a) the violation of Mendelian segregation due to segregation distortion and gene conversion during recombination, and (b) the violation of Mendelian expression due to genomic imprinting and paternal genome elimination. For my research I use mathematical models to explaining genomic and medical data.

Selected Publications

• F. Úbeda and J. Wilkins. 2007. Genomic Imprinting and Evolutionary Medicine, in Genomic Imprinting. Landes Bioscience Publishing, Georgetown, U.S.A.
• Úbeda and B.B. Normark. 2006. Male Killers and the Origins of Paternal Genome Elimination. Theoretical Population Biology 70: 511-526.
• Úbeda. 2006. Why Mendelian Segregation? Biochemical Society Transactions 34: 566-568.
• Úbeda and D. Haig. 2005. On the Evolutionary Stability of Mendelian Segregation. Genetics 170: 1345-1357.
  

Contact Information

Francisco Úbeda de Torres
Assistant Professor
Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
569 Dabney Hall
University of Tennessee
Knoxville, TN 37996-1610

Phone: 974-3065
Email: fubeda@utk.edu