Xavier Belles PhD, Research Professor at the CSIC, Director of the Institut de Biologia Evolutiva (CSIC-UPF) Passeig Marítim 37, 08003 Barcelona SPAIN E-mail: xavier.belles [at] ibe.upf-csic.es Telephone: +34 93 230 96 36 Fax: +34 93 221 10 11

Our goals and interests have been traditionally diverse, trying to embrace a number subjects around the physiology of the insect. In general, research has focused on physiological processes regulated by hormones.

At present, and according to the currently financed projects, our research focuses on four main subjects: Insect Metamorphosis, Juvenile hormone action, Small RNAs and Stress response [more].

Historically, we have studied the biochemical and regulatory aspects of the hormones themselves (juvenile hormone, ecdysteroids and regulatory peptides), and also the processes dependent on them, like metamorphosis and vitellogenesis (especially in connexion with juvenile hormone), molting, oogenesis and chorion formation (in connexion with ecdysteroids) and food intake and growth (in connexion with peptides and proteins) [more].

We like to use every scale of observation, from morphology to biochemistry and molecular biology. However, the molecular scale tends to dominate in our most recent work. In recent times, high throughput sequencing (for small RNA catalogues and for transcriptomes) has become a powerful source of basic information, whereas interference of RNA (RNAi) has become one of the main tools for functional studies.

We are interested in processes (especially metamorphosis), not only from a mechanistic point of view but also from an evolutionary perspective. Thus, we aim at comparing the mechanisms of regulation of these processes in different species, in order to infer the evolutionary history underlying them.

Given that most information available has been obtained in very modified insect species (especially in the omnipresent fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster), we focused in a poorly modified, hemimetabolan insect species, the German cockroach Blattella germanica, which, in addition, is fully sensitive to systemic RNAi.