Ladoukakis Emmanouil

Biography

Manolis received his Bachelor in Biology from the Aristotelian University of Thessaloniki, Department of Biology (1995) and his M.Sc. in Marine Biology from the Department of Biology, University of Crete, Greece (1998). He received his Ph.D. from the same Department in 2001. He worked as a Marie Curie Post Doctoral fellow at the Centre for the Study of Evolution, University of Sussex, UK (2003-2007), and as a visiting Lecturer at the School of Life Sciences, University of Sussex, UK (2006-2007). In 2005 he was elected as a Lecturer and then as Assistant Professor at the Department of Biology, University of Crete, Greece. His appointment started from 2007. In 2012 he was elected as an Assist. Professor and in 2015 as a tenure Assist. Professor at the same Department. In 2015 he worked at the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Brown University, RI, USA as a Fulbright fellow.

Research Interest

Mitochondria have been extensively studied as cellular compartments and as functional units, and their DNA has additionally been studied as molecular marker. However, the evolutionary dynamics of mitochondria remain poorly investigated. Apart from the symbiosis theory, which explains the origin of mitochondria and is supported by multiple lines of evidence, fundamental questions regarding the evolution of mitochondria and of mtDNA have been theoretically approached but remain poorly explored at the experimental level. Such questions are "why is mtDNA uniparentally transmitted?", "why is there an elevated mutation rate in animal mtDNA but a reduced mutation rate in plant mtDNA compared to the nuclear DNA?", "why animal mtDNA has an alternative genetic code compared to the nucleus whereas in plant mtDNA the genetic code is the universal?", "how can proteins encoded by two extremely different genetic backgrounds (i.e. the mitochondrial and the nuclear DNA) collaborate within the Oxidative Phosphorylation (OXPHOS) complexes in mitochondria?", "how can mtDNA survive the accumulation of deleterious mutations, from which all non-recombining genetic elements suffer?". In the lab, we are working on mtDNA recombination, on the inheritance of mtDNA, ​on mtDNA heteroplasmy, and on the mito-nuclear co-evolution. ​Microbial community structure Microbes are one of the most unexplored parts of the Tree of Life. Yet, they are extremely diverse, both taxonomically and functionally. Massive sequencing techniques allowed the detection and the study of unculturable microbes, and opened a window in a previously undetectable world. Which factors determine the community structure of microbes? We are addressing this question in the lab by investigating the relative role of selection (environmental filtering) versus randomness (historical effects) in the microbial community structure. We are also interested in the comparison of the ecology of microbes with the ecology of fauna. ​