Meet the past SIB Awards Laureates – Julien Roux

I received the award at the very beginning of my career for my first paper! It felt really thrilled and honoured to receive the award, and to be able to present these results at the [BC]² conference.

In this paper, we looked at selective pressure acting on the evolution of vertebrate genes depending on their timing of expression across development. We were inspired by studies which had observed that the morphology of embryos of different vertebrate species resemble each other most at an intermediate developmental period called the “phylotypic” period, around the pharyngula stage. But in our study, we discovered that at the genomic level, the highest degree of conservation was seen earlier than the phylotypic stage, around gastrulation. Early-expressed genes are clearly evolutionary older, have lower rates of sequence evolution, have more phenotypic impact, and duplicate less. It makes intuitive sense that they are the most sensitive to evolutionary changes, because early embryonic development is crucial for an animal to survive and to be able to reproduce later. As Lewis Wolpert put it: "It is not birth, marriage or death, but gastrulation which is truly the most important time in your life."

At the time of the award, I was also working heavily on the data integration pipeline for the Bgee database, which is now an SIB resource. Integrating data into Bgee gave me a fantastic resource for most of my PhD papers. Bgee has expanded a lot since then, but I’m quite proud that some parts of my pipeline are still used.

At the DBM Bioinformatics Core Facility, we provide bioinformatics expertise for many DBM groups mainly regarding the analyses of high-throughput genomics experiments. People come to us with their research questions and projects from a wide range of research areas: immunology, oncology, neurobiology... It is very interesting, because you have to learn about a new topic for almost every project. What I also really like in this job, is that we are involved in the projects from very early on - before the data generation steps - which gives us the opportunity to discuss the design of the experiments and thus can help to orient the projects’ direction.

There are too many to list! I started my PhD when Illumina was still called Solexa, so seeing the expansion of high-throughput sequencing and all its applications (RNA-seq, ChIP-seq, single-cell sequencing) was and still is fascinating.
On a more personal level, although I cannot really speak of "discovery", I also find it always really fascinating when, after spending quite some time pre-processing a new dataset, you finally get to visualize your samples, for example on a PCA plot, and get to be the first to see if an experiment or an idea worked. These data analysis moments are really special!