Aris Katzourakis

This study analyzes poxvirus gene repertoires and finds that they evolve through expansion-biased birth-and-death dynamics and genome architectural constraints.

The paper determines the structure of native chloroplast ribosomes in Chlamydomonas reinhardtii and identifies lineage-specific extensions linked to ribosome dynamics and evolution.

The paper identifies the recent origin and geographical distribution of bat viruses ancestral to SARS-CoV and SARS-CoV-2, showing they circulated in Asia before spilling over into humans.

The paper identifies new endogenous viral elements in vertebrate genomes, expanding the known diversity of non-retroviral EVEs by 44%.

This study applies a mechanistic model to correct for time-dependent rate phenomena in plant viruses, revealing an ancient origin for sobemoviruses over four million years ago.

This study identifies novel rodent hosts of hepaciviruses, documents their diversity, and estimates the origin of the genus to be about 22 million years ago.

This paper reconstructs the evolutionary history of SIVs and pSIVs across timescales using a time-dependent rate model, finding the most recent common ancestor of extant SIVs dates to ~1 million years ago.

The paper generates six reference-quality bat genomes, identifies genomic adaptations related to echolocation, immunity, and viral tolerance, and reveals regulatory elements contributing to bat traits.

This study develops a novel pipeline to measure low-level transcription of HERV-K (HML-2) np9 and rec genes in cancer and embryos, finding their overexpression in multiple cancers and specific embryonic stages.

The paper identifies HERV-K (HML-2) genes np9 and rec as correlated with cancer stem cell and EMT biomarkers, suggesting their role in cancer malignancy and cell state transitions.