I am a Group Leader at the Andalusian Centre for Developmental Biology (CSIC-UPO) in Seville, Spain. The main interest of the lab is to understand what happens at the very early stages of molecular novelties, the pre-setting phase or time-zero of evolutionary events. The main rationale underlying our research is that completely unexpected encounters constitute the starting point for multiple evolutionary phenomena that are major drivers of evolution. So, instead of focusing on past evolutionary patterns, we use a synthetic biology approach in which we artificially put in contact biological structures that never interacted before. This way, we aim to study the inherent capacities of biological molecular structures to interpret and read the information contained in other biological systems, even when these systems have not co-evolved with and are foreign to these biological structures. Before starting my independent lab, my research focused on comparing genomic and functional genomic data from extant species, trying to understand how the evolution of gene regulation during animal development has contributed to generate morphological diversity.